Riding Fury Home - Paperback

by Chana Wilson (Author)

In 1958, when Chana Wilson was seven, her mother attempted suicide, holding a rifle to her own head and pulling the trigger. The gun jammed and she was taken away to a mental hospital. On her return, Chana became the caretaker of her heavily medicated, suicidal mother. It would be many years before she learned the secret of her mother's anguish: her love affair with another married woman, and the psychiatric treatment aimed at curing her of her lesbianism.

Riding Fury Home spans forty years of the intense, complex relationship between Chana and her mother--the trauma of their early years together, the transformation and joy they found when they both came out in the 1970s, and the deep bond that grew between them. From the intolerance of the '50s to the exhilaration of the women's movement of the '70s and beyond, the book traces the profound ways in which their two lives were impacted by the social landscape of their time.

Exquisitely written and devastatingly honest, Riding Fury Home is a shattering account of one family's struggle against homophobia and mental illness--and a powerful story of healing, forgiveness, and redemption.

Author Biography

Chana Wilson is a psychotherapist and a former radio producer and television engineer. She began her career in broadcast journalism as a radio programmer with KPFA in Berkeley, California. Her work hosting the KPFA program A World Wind--in which she interviewed poets, musicians, writers and activists--sparked her desire to work with people on a deeper level. Now a psychotherapist for twenty-four years, she credits the extraordinary courage of her clients for inspiring her to write.

Wilson's writing has appeared in the print journals The Sun and Sinister Wisdom, the online journals Roadwork and Aunt Lute, and in several anthologies. Since the publication of Riding Fury Home, Wilson has become a blogger on the Huffington Post. Her essays have been Editor's Choice on Salon.com.

Since the mid-eighties, Wilson has been playing percussion with the women's samba band Sistah Boom.