Synopses & Reviews
That Mean Old Yesterday is anastonishing coming-of-age memoirby a young woman who survivedthe foster care system to become anaward-winning journalist.
No one would ever imagine that the vibrant,smart, and attractive Stacey Patton had achildhood from hell. Once a foster child whofound a home, she was supposed to be amongthe lucky. On a rainy night in November 1999,a shoeless Stacey, promising student at NYU,headed down a New Jersey street toward heradoptive parents' house. She carried a gun inher pocket, and she kept repeating to herselfthat she would pull the trigger. She wanted tokill them. Or so she thought.
This is a story of how a typical Americanfamily can be undermined by its own effortto be perfect on the surface. After all, withGod-fearing, house-proud, and hardworkingadoptive parents, Stacey appeared to beatthe odds. But her mother was tyrannical, andher father, either so in love with or in fear ofhis wife, turned a blind eye to the abuse sheheaped on their love-starved little girl.
In That Mean Old Yesterday, a little girlrises above the tyranny of an overzealousmother by channeling her intellectual energyinto schoolwork. Wise beyond her years,she can see that her chances for survival areadvanced through her struggle to get into anelite boarding school. She uses all she has, a brilliant mind, to link her experience to thelegacy of American slavery and to successfullyframe her understanding of why her goodadoptive parents did terrible things to her byrealizing that they had terrible things done tothem.
Review
"[A]n unforgettable document of uniquely intelligent triumph." -- David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Review
"Raw with pain, anger, and yearning, That Mean Old Yesterday also crackles with an abundance of intelligence, courage, and pure guts. Stacey Patton survived a childhood of abandonment and abuse and built herself into an accomplished, truly self-made young woman. Her memoir will grab you by the heart and blow your mind. A stunning literary debut." -- Jill Nelson, author of the bestselling memoir Volunteer Slavery and, most recently, Finding Martha's Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island
Review
"Stacey Patton is a tour-de-force writer -- weaving together her many gifts as a natural storyteller as well as a steel-eyed historian, scholar, sage, poet, and journalist. In That Mean Old Yesterday, Patton performs a kind of sleight of hand by telling her own heartbreaking and triumphant story in context of the collective journey of African Americans -- out of slavery, through freedom, toward redemption. What makes this memoir even more universal and important is that in it we are movingly shown how it is possible to confront the past and why we must." -- Mim Eichler Rivas, coauthor of The Pursuit of Happyness with Chris Gardner and Quincy Troupe
Review
"For those of us who have lived through the war zone of family violence and the attempted denigration of the human spirit, Stacey Patton's That Mean Old Yesterday is a testament that you can reclaim your life and positively impact the lives of others. In her deeply moving and revealing memoir, Patton powerfully reminded me that there is always hope." -- Victor Rivas Rivers, actor, activist, and author of A Private Family Matter