The Ugly Cry

Description

“They say comedy equals tragedy plus time: This very funny account of an often miserable childhood is proof.” –People

“What a strong, funny, heartbreaking memoir, with a voice that is completely its own (written by a woman who very much seems to be completely her own, as well.) I loved it.”–Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Big Magic and Eat, Pray, Love
 
An uproarious, moving memoir about a grandmother’s ferocious love and redefining what it means to be family

“If you fight that motherf**ker and you don’t win, you’re going to come home and fight me.” Not the advice you’d normally expect from your grandmother—but Danielle Henderson would be the first to tell you her childhood was anything but conventional.

Abandoned at ten years old by a mother who chose her drug-addicted, abusive boyfriend, Danielle was raised by grandparents who thought their child-rearing days had ended in the 1960s. She grew up Black, weird, and overwhelmingly uncool in a mostly white neighborhood in upstate New York, which created its own identity crises. Under the eye-rolling, foul-mouthed, loving tutelage of her uncompromising grandmother—and the horror movies she obsessively watched—Danielle grew into a tall, awkward, Sassy-loving teenager who wore black eyeliner as lipstick and was struggling with the aftermath of her mother’s choices. But she also learned that she had the strength and smarts to save herself, her grandmother gifting her a faith in her own capabilities that the world would not have most Black girls possess.

With humor, wit, and deep insight, Danielle shares how she grew up and grew wise—and the lessons she’s carried from those days to these. In the process, she upends our conventional understanding of family and redefines its boundaries to include the millions of people who share her story.
 Most Anticipated Book of the Summer with
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“Danielle Henderson knows how to hold your attention…You hang on every word because this is the kind of friend you want to keep.” —The New York Times Book Review

“I’ve struggled writing this blurb because hyperbole is unbelievable. Except the Grand Canyon really is astonishing and the universe does fill us with awe and Danielle Henderson’s memoir, The Ugly Cry, is the funniest memoir I have ever read. It is also achingly sad. And powerfully redemptive. The Ugly Cry raises the bar on how hilarious and brave and weird and crazy and screamingly brilliant a memoir can be. Danielle Henderson has knocked it out of the park and into the stratosphere with this debut.” –Augusten Burroughs, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Running with Scissors

“Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking…Her deeply honest writing is crisp, engaging, and full of life as it examines the complexity of identity, family, childhood, and independence.” —Associated Press

“Simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious, Henderson dissects her unusual upbringing and her special relationship with her grandmother, offering a powerful examination of the many intersections between family and identity.” –TIME

“The book scissored my heart to shreds…The Ugly Cry is a vivid, voice-y, richly textured read.” —The Washington Post

“Danielle Henderson is a wonderful writer, and this clear-eyed look at her complex and flawed childhood did make me cry, as the title promises, but it also made me laugh–that is the beauty of a life well told. I look forward to recommending The Ugly Cry to memoir-lovers, to mall-lovers, to tough grandma-lovers, to tough-sister-lovers–to everyone, really.” —Emma Straub, bestselling author of All Adults Here

“The Ugly Cry is funny and honest, disarming and bracing, like sharing a long meal with a new friend while she unspools the story of how she came to call her grandma the love of her life.” –Linda Holmes, bestselling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over

“Elder millennials in particular will find much to love in Henderson’s descriptions of her late-Gen-X childhood.” —Bustle

“Just as real life can so often be, Danielle Henderson’s The Ugly Cry is both hysterical and heart-wrenching. The TV writer touchingly recounts how she was raised by a tough-as-nails grandmother in a mostly white neighborhood in Upstate New York.” —Real Simple

“Can a book be hysterical and heartbreaking and smart all at the same time? The Ugly Cry can. It was painfully good and I loved it.” –Jenny Lawson, bestselling author of Furiously Happy

“[Henderson] renders her family with searing honesty and wit…[and] brings them to life with her indefatigable sense of humor, which is as quick and sharp as the violence she lived with as a child…sheopts for mirth over pathos, and the results are often shocking and funny simultaneously.” –Bookpage, starred review

“Henderson writes with an incredible amount of vulnerability, presenting her story with a cleareyed compassion for her mother, grandmother, and, ultimately, herself. A redemptive memoir about a Black woman’s victory over childhood abuse, racism, and mental illness.” —KirkusDanielle Henderson is a TV writer (Maniac, Dare Me, Harper House), retired freelance writer, and a former editor for Rookie. She cohosts the film podcast I Saw What You Did, and a book based on her popular website, Feminist Ryan Gosling, was released by Running Press in August 2012. She has been published by The New York Times, The Guardian, AFAR magazine, BuzzFeed, and The Cut, among others. She likes to watch old episodes of Doctor Who when she is on deadline, one of her tattoos is based on the movie Rocky, and she will never stop using the Oxford comma. Danielle reluctantly lives in Los Angeles.
 

1.

 

My mom and dad met in drum corps; I have no idea what instrument he played or even if he was any good. It would be weird if I did, since I don’t even know what he looks like. His name was Carlton; he lived in Newburgh, about forty minutes away from Greenwood Lake, the small New York town where my mother grew up. They met at a parade. My grandmother didn’t know that my mom had a boyfriend until he showed up to take her to her junior prom. There’s a picture of them from that night, one of the only ones to survive my grandma’s wrath; Mom was wearing a floor-length white dress with navy blue polka dots, afro picked out as wide as her shoulders. My dad was tall and handsome in his brown corduroy suit, the wide collar of his white button-down threatening to consume his shoulders. His afro was smaller, but the flash cube from the camera made the product in his hair glisten. In true seventies style, the photo is blurry and grainy; I can make out his features, but they don’t add up to anything more than a generic face. They stood in front of my grandparents’ fireplace for the photo, wide-eyed and slightly smiling.

 

My dad was a year older than my mom, and when he graduated from high school, his family moved to North Carolina. My grandmother chalked up their relationship to a high school romance and didn’t really think of it again. She told Mom to get over it.

 

But my mom was not over it. Not in the least bit.

 

The summer after she graduated from high school, my mom got a job dressing up as Wile E. Coyote at Jungle Habitat, a Warner Bros. theme park over the Greenwood Lake border in West Milford, New Jersey. The park was filled to the brim with wild animals, and the main attraction seemed to be that you could watch them roam freely as you carefully cruised by in your car. As you can imagine, this was an idea with a terribly short shelf life; Jungle Habitat closed within a few years amid a litany of persistent scandals. One man was attacked by a lion shortly after the park opened; another woman was bitten by an elephant. Several of the animals got out and were found wandering around residential areas nearby. My mom’s summer job was to dress up like a cartoon and welcome families to this pending horror show, probably taking bets with her coworkers about which of them would come out unscathed by the end of the workday.

 

At the end of the summer, after she had saved what she thought was enough money to survive, my mom packed a suitcase. She left it behind the shed in the backyard, which was rarely, so she knew it would be safe. She hitched a ride to work with some friends and came home like everything was normal for the next few days. Then, one morning after she had confirmed plans with my dad-whom she had been in touch with all along-she grabbed her suitcase, acted as though she was leaving for work, and instead took a bus into New York City and another bus from the Port Authority down to North Carolina. At nineteen, she had decided that her life was her own, and she was going to use it to chase a man.

 

For decades after, my family would ask, “What happened to make her like this?” Mom had a run-of-the-mill, 2.1-kids, stay-at-home-mom kind of family. The kids wore matching outfits for the annual family photo at Sears and were surrounded by cousins, aunts, and uncles at summer barbecues. Grandma had been a different kind of parent to her than she was to me: when I complained about mildly blurry vision as a teenager, Grandma told me that my eyes were fine and “That’s what you get for reading those fucking books all night when you should be asleep.” When Mom needed glasses as a kid, Grandma actually got them for her. Running away was an abnormal event in such a normal childhood. Decades later, my grandma still asks herself what happened, a bubble of self-indictment quietly rising to the surface as she wonders out loud. “She was raised in the same house as your aunt and uncle . . . I just don’t understand,” she whispers, actively searching for a place to lay blame.

 

For the rest of their lives, they would never receive a satisfying answer.

 

My grandparents didn’t know where my mom was for three months. It was so well-orchestrated that when she disappeared, nobody suspected a thing-my grandparents, assuming she was dead on the side of the road somewhere, waited for the day they’d get a call telling them her remains had been found. Grandma started going gray. Granddad stopped talking.

 

“It probably took ten years off of all of our lives,” my grandma said, recounting those months. “I was a wreck, your grandfather was a wreck, Rene and Bobby were so sad. Fucking selfish, in the end, you know? All that misery for a penis.”

 

After contacting the police and filing a missing-persons report, my family sat and waited. It wasn’t until my grandma got the idea to check the phone bill that they got any relief. “I saw all of these long-distance calls from around the time she went missing. I thought, ‘Who the hell is she calling?’ So I dialed the number, and she picked up,” my grandma said. “Just as happy as a clam, like nothing had happened. I said, ‘Robin, where the fuck are you?’ She told me she was in North Carolina with Carlton.” Grandma was getting annoyed retelling the story. “I don’t know why, but I asked her, ‘Are you pregnant?’ She said yes. Just like that. I told her she better fucking stay there and slammed down the phone.” My grandma seethes with anger when she tells this story, even now, almost fifty years later. “I didn’t raise my children to be like that.”

 

My older brother, Cory, was born in February 1976. My father was already cheating on my mom by then, and her life in North Carolina was bleak. She lived in a trailer with my dad on his family’s property in a rural town; she couldn’t afford the hospital bill after Cory was born, so she called her grandmother, Sweetie Pie, to wire her some money via Western Union so that she could take him home. He was all she had; she was so lonely she rarely put him down-but even when she held him, he cried mercilessly. She was exhausted.

 

A few months after Cory was born, my grandma got a letter from one of my mom’s few friends in North Carolina. She said that Robin wasn’t doing so well, but she seemed like she came from a nice family, and maybe she should go home. Again, Sweetie Pie wired her some money, and my mom and Cory took the long bus drive back to New York, almost two years after she escaped.

 

Granddad met my mom at the bus. He was introduced to his first grandchild on a platform in the Port Authority, surrounded by the noise and grime of New York City. He was so disturbed by the way my mom looked that he couldn’t even speak; he hugged her but didn’t say a word until the next day. She was wearing old men’s clothes and was completely disheveled. Like no one was taking care of her, like she had stopped taking care of herself. Her appearance wasn’t the only surprise my mom brought home with her; when my grandmother looked down, she saw my mom’s belly protruding, like a grapefruit attached to straw. A small tidbit her friend had left out of her letter, but possibly the reason she wrote in the first place.

 

“Are you pregnant again?” my grandma asked.

 

My mom nodded.

 

 

 

My grandparents got creative to make space for three kids in their two-bedroom home. They took one of the bedrooms, my mom and aunt shared the other, and my uncle Bobby slept on the screened-in porch. Every single one of your neighbors would call Child Protective Services if you put a child on the porch these days, but this was the seventies, which was basically a lawless decade where children were concerned. Lawn Darts-a game where one child would stand in a Hula-Hoop placed on the ground and another child would aim for the hoop by launching oversize, spiky metal darts at them-hit its peak in this era for a reason: if your child was fed and moderately clothed, people turned a blind eye to your second-degree murder-adjacent shenanigans.

 

Bobby loved his space on the porch. He had blinds over the windows to cut down on the glare from the lake, as well as a large bookcase that gave him some privacy since the front door to the house was technically one of his walls. Birds used to land on the bushes outside his window, and he would cluck and chirp at them every morning. It was an idyllic room, if you didn’t focus on the fact that it was the only way for every person in the family to get in and out of the house.

 

My aunt was not so lucky. After having her entire bedroom to herself for her last year of high school, she found herself rooming with her pregnant sister and a colicky one-year-old shortly before graduation. I’m not sure “cockblock” is the correct term; for the sake of my own sanity, I have to believe no one in that house ever had sex. But your pregnant, wayward sister returning like some kind of fucked-up prodigal mess would put a damper on anyone’s lifestyle and make a lesser person lose their mind. Thankfully, my aunt has always been incredible and gracious, and she bonded with Cory immediately. Did anyone ever thank her for that? If someone showed up to my house now, pregnant and with an infant, I would break my own fingers typing into my phone as I tried to find them the nearest Airbnb.

 

When I was born, absolutely no one was prepared for me to arrive. Pregnancy wasn’t at all like the checklist-heavy micromanagerial bonanza it is today, but you’d think someone would have at least been clocking contractions with mild interest in between popping cans of Tab and smoking cigarettes down to the filter. Mom and Grandma always breathlessly tell the story between bouts of laughter, amazed at my ability to enter the world despite their own ineptitude.

 

I imagine she had been uncomfortable all day, but for some reason, Mom didn’t tell Grandma she was in labor. It was a little over a month before my due date, so it’s possible she just thought she had gas. I’ve never been pregnant, but an extra helping of mashed potatoes is all I need to feel like there’s a bowling ball resting on my spine for the duration of an evening, so I can forgive her. Grandma, true to form, told Mom to stop complaining and go back to bed. Grandma is a medical marvel; she had her motherly instincts surgically removed as soon as Bobby could talk, relieved that she was done nurturing now that her youngest child had an elementary understanding of communicative tools. Not the best person to have on your side if you’re feeling a mild muscular cramp, let alone fully going into labor.

 

My mom couldn’t sleep, of course, and finally told my grandma she was in labor. “I was so fucking mad because it was the middle of the night,” my grandma says, still upset with me forty years later for waking her up. “They knocked me out when all of my kids were born-called it twilight sleep-so I was always coming to in the morning like a normal person. No one wants to meet a baby in the middle of the night.”

 

Since neither of my grandparents ever learned to drive, they called one of my grandma’s friends to help get my mom to the hospital. Darlene was white, but she was close enough to the family to get a Black nickname, so I’ve always known her as Nana Dar. She and my grandma first met at a school board meeting and just started talking one day after seeing each other around town. Like most small towns, Greenwood Lake was still a fairly prejudiced place to live-people scowled at my family, and many people wouldn’t let their kids play with my mom, aunt, and uncle. But my grandma was bored and needed a friend, so she did her best to make friends. Nana Dar had a reddish bouffant hairdo and icy blue eyes that set off her olive skin. Like my grandmother, she smoked constantly; I can barely picture her without imagining a curl of smoke drifting up from her chin and dissipating in the air above her head. She was probably smoking when she showed up after midnight to take my mom and grandmother to the nearest hospital in Goshen. Nana Dar and Grandma were definitely chain-smoking the entire thirty-minute drive there. My mom was basically in the back seat crowning, and those two were up front, joking about how she better not give birth in the car, all while flicking clouds of ash on my fontanelle.

 

It wasn’t long after my mom was admitted that I was born, on a balmy June night at 5:00 a.m. in the middle of 1977. A nurse had knocked on the waiting-room window, and when Grandma and Nana Dar turned around, she had me in her arms. “She was holding you like a football, with your little chin in between her thumb and forefinger,” my grandma says, stifling some laughter. “We couldn’t figure out why it was so strange until we really looked at you, and goddammit, your eyes were wide-open. We couldn’t believe it.” She always takes time here to imitate my newborn head bobbing around, gazing out the window. “You were just dah, dah, dah, looking around, even though you couldn’t see a damn thing. You weren’t crying-just looking. It was the creepiest thing,” she says, laughing. “But my god, you were beautiful. From the minute you came into this world, you wanted to see everything in it.”

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.8000 × 5.5200 × 8.1900 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780525559375
ISBN-10	052555937X
Author	Danielle Henderson
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	BIO002000, FAM053000
Subjects	memoir books, memoirs, black authors, relationship books, autobiographies, funny memoirs, books by black authors, biographies of famous people, autobiography books, motivational books, biographies and memoirs, gifts for grandmother, best friend gifts, sister gifts, drug addiction, FAM053000, new york memoirs, gifts for women, relationships, family, biography, Memoir, motherhood, book club books, BIO002000, books for mom, racism, Family relationships, gifts for grandma, autobiography, racial inequality, Black women, biographies, inspirational books