Street Angel

By: Magie Dominic

Narrated by: Ryanne Chisholm

Length: 5 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's summary

Magie Dominic’s first memoir, The Queen of Peace Room, was shortlisted for the Canadian Women’s Studies Award, ForeWord magazine’s Book of the Year Award, and the Judy Grahn Award. Told over an eight-day period, the book captured a lifetime of turbulent memories, documenting with skill Dominic’s experiences of violence, incest, and rape. But her story wasn’t finished.

Street Angel opens to the voice of an eleven-year-old Dominic. She’s growing up in Newfoundland. Her mother suffers from terrifying nighttime hallucinations. Her father’s business is about to collapse. She layers the world she hears on radio and television onto her family, speaking in paratactic prose with a point-blank delivery. She finds relief only in the glamour of Hollywood films and the majesty of Newfoundland’s wilderness.

Revealing her life through flashbacks, humour, and her signature self-confidence, Dominic takes listeners from 1950s Newfoundland to 1960s Pittsburgh, 1970s New York, and the end of the millennium in Toronto. Capturing the long days of childhood, this book questions how important those days are in shaping who we become as we age and time seems to speed up. With quick brush-stroke chapters Dominic chronicles sixty years of a complex, secretive family in this story about violence, adolescence, families, and forgiveness.

©2014 Wilfrid Laurier University Press (P)2022 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Critic reviews

"Street Angel picks up the thread of narrative from The Queen of Peace Room, spanning politics, celebrity, social history, war, television, film, pop music, and other media. Dominic imbues all of this for us, her readers, in luminous prose, crafting an odyssey across decades. In this exceptionally courageous account, the author seeks to overcome familial abuse, utilizing the virtues of intelligence, wit, and passion, accompanied by a chorus of societal furies, such as world wars, economic upheaval, and social unrest. This is where she reaches a zenith of life writing."—Anne Burke, editor of The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, chair of the Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets, 2014 July 01

"I finished Street Angel. Savoured it slowly, which is not always my way. Didn't want it to end. So much loss and pain and then again, such beauty, and isn't that the way of life, the mystery we can never quite understand. I was very very moved by it."—Heather King, author of Parched: A Memoir and Redeemed: Stumbling toward God, Marginal Sanity, and the Peace that Passes all Understanding, 2014 October 01

"Magie Dominic tells us many things about her young life as a little girl on the seacoast of Newfoundland, where in the 1940s it matters a lot if you are Catholic or non-Catholic. This little girl grows up to become the woman who is able to write this book against all the odds of fear and superstition."—Nancy Milford, author of Zelda (1970), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and Savage Beauty, a biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay (2001), 2014 July 01