The Girl Factory: A Memoir

· Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Cassandra Campbell
Audiobook
8 hr 25 min
Unabridged
Eligible
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About this audiobook

It's 1985 in a small factory town near Pittsburgh. Eight-year-old Karen's parents are lifelong workers at the Anchor Glass plant, where one Saturday, an employee goes on a shooting spree, killing four supervisors, then himself. This event splits the young girl's life open, and like her mother, she begins to seek comfort in obsessive rituals and superstitions.


This beautifully evocative memoir chronicles the next fourteen years, as Karen moves through girlhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. It illuminates small-town factory life; explores a complicated mother-daughter bond; thoughtfully unfolds a smart but insecure girl's coming of age; achingly recounts her attempts to use sex to fit in; and ultimately uncovers the buried secret from her childhood—a medical file with an unbearable report.


The Girl Factory deftly travels the intersections of memory and origin. Karen's body remembers details her mind has tried to control. As the young woman mines her interior landscape for answers, certain questions persist. Where does memory live—in the body or the mind? And can you rewrite the story of your past?
It's 1985 in a small factory town near Pittsburgh. Eight-year-old Karen's parents are lifelong workers at the Anchor Glass plant, where one Saturday, an employee goes on a shooting spree, killing four supervisors, then himself. This event splits the young girl's life open, and like her mother, sh...

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About the author

Karen Dietrich is an adjunct English instructor at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg and Westmoreland County Community College. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Pittsburgh City Paper, Nerve, the Bellingham Review, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere.

Actress and director Cassandra Campbell has narrated nearly two hundred audiobooks and has received multiple Audie Awards and more than twenty AudioFile Earphones Awards, including for Orange Is the New Black by Piper Kerman.

Karen Dietrich is an adjunct English instructor at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg and Westmoreland County Community College. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Pittsburgh City Paper, Nerve, the Bellingham Review, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. Actres...

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