Reviewed by Bessie Taliaferro

In a gripping scene from T Kira Madden's new essay collection, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, Madden finds her father lying naked on the bathroom floor after he has spent another night at the strip club. It was his birthday. "I said wake the fuck up, ass-blob," Madden's mother demands to her husband. She has decided that the three of them will celebrate by riding in a hot air balloon, fully cognizant of her husband's fear of heights. After driving to the Everglades, an hour away from their Boca Raton mansion, they step into the basket to ascend. Her father quickly unravels, pleading for a drink as they float over South Florida. On the way down, they crash into the roof of a house. Shingles fly. "Good excuse for a home makeover!" says their guide Dwayne, the "balloon man," to the disgruntled homeowner.

Madden captures experiences like this, at once funny and sobering, in Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. The captivating memoir is comprised of twenty-six essays—flashes—ranging from a paragraph to twenty pages. She is the paternal niece of the designer Steve Madden, and her parents married after she was born. Madden grew up hiding their drug addiction: "Secrets are the only love I know." Her father dies when she is twenty-seven. While grieving, Madden connects with long-lost relatives, some of whom she meets for the first time. The memoir's final essays shed light on her family's history as well as Madden's own difficult childhood.

Long Live is a story of resilience in the face of trauma, and many of the memoir's disturbing incidents are about Madden's father. In "Chicken & Stars," Madden describes him drunkenly chasing her and her mother while swinging a baseball bat. More often, though, her father is on the couch, "facedown on the pink leather cushions," sleeping so deeply that he appears to be dead. Despite his failures as a parent, John Madden is often captured with warmth and humor. When he dances with Madden in their living room or simply asks about her day, she feels loved and safe. These moments continue into Madden's adulthood and echo throughout the memoir. After her father becomes sober towards the end of his life, he takes her on dates to see movies in the morning. He is always early. In her twenties, Madden comes out as queer after years of hiding, and her father is unwaveringly loving and supportive. In Long Live, happiness is rendered with the same precision as agony, and even abusive characters can be charming.

While Madden's parents are both negligent and tender, her friends are at once vulnerable and cruel. Harley and Nelle, "all ass and stomach and lip gloss and tongue rings," welcome Madden, whom they call "Kinky Chinky," offering her hard liquor and a sense of belonging. Harley in particular possesses a "glittering viciousness." Madden complies with even her most degrading requests ("Wipe my ass for me?"). Despite the abuse, Madden finds a kinship with Harley and Nelle. With fathers that are absent or dead, the unsupervised girls are bound by both pain and freedom. Harley and Nelle offer Madden an escape from the turmoil she experiences at home. Madden is drawn to their recklessness and charisma. The reader—reluctantly—is too.

Madden joins Harley and Nelle's "sisterhood" after years of being an outcast as a child. Her mother is Chinese-Hawaiian and Madden faces constant racism from her peers. (They are also unrelenting about her headgear, chronic nosebleeds, and backpack with wheels.) Then, Madden "found pretty." She describes achieving conventional beauty using violent and unusual images. Tanning beds, for example, are startlingly characterized as "that blue scream of light baking my naked body." From a young age, Madden engages in self-harm to change her appearance. She even goes so far as to remove a mole—"speckled and sprouted with a few wired hairs"—from her wrist using a knife in her kitchen. The two-page essay is brimming with images that are typically feminine, like diamonds and lace: "The blood and hole where my mole used to be glimmers like a garnet under the kitchen lights."

Madden's raw and vibrant essays—on moles, grief, identity, and so much more—unfold in the present tense, making each experience even more intimate. "What we are is up in the air," she writes of the balloon ride on her father's birthday. The reader is with Madden, it seems, standing quietly beneath the fire that is keeping her afloat.