Darling Days

By: iO Tillett Wright

Narrated by: iO Tillett Wright

I was born September 1985, in the vortex of the Lower East Side of New York: there were few rules of life and zero constraints on behavior. If you were not eccentric, you were weird.

It was a tenement building at the centre of the drug-addled, punk-edged permanent riot that was iO's corner of the Lower East Side of New York City in the '80s and 90's. There iO grew up - or rather scrabbled up - under the broken wing of a fiercely protective yet wildly negligent mother.

Rhonna was a showgirl, an actress, a dancer, a poet. A widow by police murder, she was also an addict. She doted and obsessed over iO yet lacked an understanding that a child needs food and sleep and safety.

Unfolding in animated, crystalline prose, an emotionally raw, devastatingly powerful memoir of one young person's extraordinary coming of age - a tale of gender and identity, freedom and addiction, rebellion and survival in the 1980s and 1990s, when punk, poverty, heroin and art collided in the urban bohemia of New York's Lower East Side.

Darling Days is also a provocative examination of culture and identity, of the instincts that shape us and the norms that deform us and of the courage and resilience of a child listening closely to their deepest self. When a group of boys refuse to let the six-year-old play ball, iO instantly adopts a new persona, becoming a boy named Ricky, a choice the parents support and celebrate. It is the start of a profound exploration of gender and identity through the tenderest years and the beginning of a life invented and reinvented at every step.

Alternating between the harrowing and the hilarious, Darling Days is the candid, tough and stirring memoir of a young person in search of an authentic self as family and home life devolve into chaos until iO escapes to Germany and then England to become an amazingly talented, exciting, edgy artist and wonderful writer.

©2016 iO Tillett Wright (P)2016 Little Brown Book Group

Listen to this book, it’s incredible

This is one of the most beautiful, honest, touching, funny, poignant, human books about personal experience that extends into the human experience. iO Tillet Wright is an unrivaled storyteller.

Riveting memoir

Incredible! I hung on every word.
Very impressive to hear such a detailed reflection on one’s life. Thanks for sharing iO.