Shantel Williams is a bitch. A ghetto-ass, slick-talking, dope-cooking, Gucci bag toting, nine-millimeter pistol carrying, cold-hearted, thug-loving, bitch. And new Chicago-bred author, Cecelia Robinson, does a marvelous job conveying that message in her magnificent debut release, Memoirs of a Bitch.
Shantel is missing and a police detective is hired by a mysterious person to locate her. After seeing her face on television, Shantel contacts the detective and agrees to meet him at a discreet location where she begins to tell the story of why she had to get out of dodge. The local diner becomes a point of rendezvous where Shantel lays bear the drama of her past life and why she went into hiding, providing the reader with a shaded window view into the tragic story of a brother and sisters remarkable journey through a tumultuous childhood of abuse, neglect, and sexual molestation. After being removed from their parents custody, and placed in foster care, Shantel and Sean-Sean decide that their undetermined destinies will only depend on their own courageous leap of faith – a leap which lands them at the doorsteps of a manipulative drug dealer named Rico. This toxic mix only yields cash, money, and pleasure, and eventually places the trio at a climactic boil where Shantel must decide what is true and what is not.
The plot is decent and suspenseful, and the storyline flows quite well. The book speaks to several relevant social issues – historically taboo issues in the black community. For example, child molestation – and even hints of incest – are very visible in this book (Shantel’s brother is unusually protective of his attractive sister, and hates the thought of another guy fucking her). As children, Shantel and Sean-Sean are constantly subjected to horrific verbal and sexual abuse at the hands of a brutal father. But what is also interesting is the lack of emotion and feeling in the narrator’s random stream-of-consciousness as she nonchalantly recants a daunting childhood. One can almost feel the dispassionate tone as she explains the verbal and sexual abuse at the hands of her father and uncles. This gripping recount is vivid and direct:
My daddy had me so fucked up in the head, because he kept telling me a whole bunch of bullshit, and by me being so young, I thought he really gave a fuck about me because he was my daddy, yeah right. Back then I thought that my daddy was supposed to fuck me. I thought I was supposed to suck daddy’s dick. I thought that when mama was away at work or wherever in the hell she would drift off to, because she was tired of daddy’s shit and didn’t feel like getting her ass whooped, that I was suppose to take on her role as lady of the house. Shit, that’s what daddy had told me. I remember he use to have company over when mama was away. All men. He would beat Sean-Sean’s ass for no reason at all and make him go to bed. No dinner, no shit. “Go to bed, motherfucker.” ….He was so cold as winter to him. When Sean-Sean was gone, daddy would tell me to come and keep him and his friends company. My seven year old mind thought that I was special or some shit because daddy and his friends wanted me as company. Those sick ass niggas took turns playing with my Ms. Kitty. Licking on it. Sticking they fingers in and out of it. Some even put their dicks in it. It didn’t hurt though; my daddy had done all this type of shit to me before. I was use to it.
Disappointingly, Robinson does little to make the connection between the horrible childhood of rampant abuse to their later years as full-fledged criminals. And, beyond the first chapter, sexual abuse is no longer an overt issue and is all together silenced (as though erased from her consciousness….buried deep withing her mind…the mark of a molested child), thus the major motifs are drugs, cartel violence, greed, and pleasure. Ironically, it is only in the narrative (which ultimately sheds greater light on Cecelia Robinson) that we get to see – or at least imagine – the possibilities of how the childhood abuse might’ve affected Shantel and her brother. With Sean-Sean’s character Robinson takes a brilliantly suspenseful turn near the books end – and we never really see this one coming – but, because she neglects the chance to work the character into the fold of the plot, we cannot make the link between the younger Sean-Sean to the powerful scene that leaves us spell-bound and confused.
Robinson constructs her characters quite well (almost brilliantly), yet, at times the characters are situated in vague and/or contradictory contexts. Shantel is coldhearted towards women (she is a merciless bitch towards the diner waitress), but soft-hearted and vulnerable towards men (most of the men in her love-life are manipulative, deceitful, and selfish. She even has anal sex with her boyfriend, Milkbone). These ambiguities leave us startled and confused because we need to see and feel the tragic results emanating from her childhood, but we also desire redemption – which Robinson ultimately sidesteps for the safe route of closure. In that sense, while Robinson certainly does captivate our attention immediately in the opening chapter, “The Beginnings of Bullshit” (cleverly manipulating our natural voyueristic tendencies for human indecency), the book works harder to keep us peering through the filthy, stained glass in hopes of finding our own humanity.
Regardless of a few editing errors, Memoirs of a Bitch is good because, in the end, Robinson’s story is our story. And once we get past her bullshit beginnings and bitch exterior, we can then make the connection.
A must read!
what about the kennedys 
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