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"Like James Ellroy's, My Dark Places, DOWN CITY is a gripping narrative built of memory and reportage, and Leah Carroll's portrait of Rhode Island is sure to take a place next Mary Karr's portrayal of her childhood in East Texas and David Simon's gritty Baltimore. Leah Carroll's mother, a gifted amateur photographer, was murdered by two drug dealers with Mafia connections when Leah was four years old. Her father, a charming alcoholic who hurtled between depression and mania, was dead by the time she was eighteen. Why did her mother have to die? Why did the man who killed her receive such a light sentence? What darkness did Leah inherit from her parents? Leah was left to put together her own future and, now in her memoir, she explores the mystery of her parents' lives, through interviews, photos, and police records. DOWN CITY is a raw, wrenching memoir of a broken family and an indelible portrait of Rhode Island- a tiny state where the ghosts of mafia kingpins live alongside the feisty, stubborn people working hard just to get by. Heartbreaking, and mesmerizing, it's the story of a resilient young woman's determination to discover the truth about a mother she never knew and the deeply troubled father who raised her-a man who was, Leah writes, "both my greatest champion and biggest obstacle.""--… (more)
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Carroll’s parents were bright and charming Rhode Islanders. Both were photographers. While her mother (Joan) was a gifted amateur (the jacket image is of her mother in the process of taking a photo), her dad (Kevin) was a professional newspaper photographer for the Providence Journal. Both also were addicts. While her mother’s weakness was drugs, her father’s happened to be alcohol.
Leah’s mother was from a Jewish family living in one of the Providence suburbs. She was fun loving but also reckless. Carroll speculates that her mom was introduced to drugs through the “collection” her dad had to manage his depression. She was brutally strangled in 1984 by a couple of drug dealers with mob connections. They thought she was a police informant. Ironically, they received light sentences in exchange for information about the mob. Carroll was dismayed to learn that a trial for her mother’s murderers never happened. The connection of the murder to the mafia suggests that her death was an unfortunate consequence of organized crime in Rhode Island. Regrettably Carroll was forced to conclude that “almost everyone involved . . . saw her (mother) as a disposable person.”
Like so many others, her Irish-Catholic father returned damaged from the Vietnam War with substance abuse and psychological issues. As an autodidact, he instilled an intellectual curiosity in Leah, but notwithstanding their closeness, he was not a particularly good father. Following Joan’s murder, Kevin moved the family to the suburbs, but never really conquered his alcohol dependency or depression. Fourteen years following Joan’s murder, Kevin’s body was discovered on the floor of the Sportsman’s Inn in downtown Providence. Carroll notes that this is a place that illustrates Providence’s decay and more recent recovery. It began as a home for wayward sailors, morphed into a tavern (the Sportsman’s Inn), and later became the Dean Hotel.
In researching her parents’ lives and deaths, Carroll conducted a prodigious amount of research. Obviously this is a work of self-definition designed to tell stories that mattered to her. Her sources included her own and familial memories, newspaper accounts, police records, interviews and photos. Moreover she creates an accurate portrait of Providence at the time. Most of the industry was gone, the jobs that existed were largely blue-collar, the city’s core contained many rough taverns, the mafia was ascendant, and the local government was corrupt. The memoir’s title comes from a local term for downtown Providence. The ivy league Brown University is up on the hill and everything else is “down city.”