Peering Through the Crack & Good-Bye to All that

Abstract

Social relationships are enacted and remembered through interpersonal relationships and replayed through the media as the author uses a defining personal experience, that of her son's drug addiction, to rethink, analyze, and resituate herself in the world. The result draws attention to the messy juxtaposition of social structures and policies with personal loss, grief, anger, and episodes of joy and courage. Crack, whether drug, fissure, gibe, highlights remembered fragments which allow the author to tell her stories in ways other than those originally considered. As those personal stories are interwoven with public moments such as school desegregation and changes in telecommunications and popular culture, a social commentary is offered that defamiliarizes the familiar, evokes rather than represents, and therefore offers the reader entry into the narrative, the cultural critique.