My Life as a Rat: A Novel

“A painful truth of family life: the most tender emotions can change in an instant.  You think your parents love you but is it you they love, or the child who is theirs?”  --Joyce Carol Oates, My Life as a Rat

Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth? Is telling the truth ever a mistake and is lying for one’s family ever justified?  Can one do the right thing, but bitterly regret it?  

My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at age twelve, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an African-American boy by her older brothers. In a succession of vividly recalled episodes Violet contemplates the circumstances of her life as the initially beloved youngest child of seven Kerrigan children who inadvertently “informs” on her brothers, setting into motion their arrests and convictions and her own long estrangement.

Arresting and poignant, My Life as a Rat traces a life of banishment from a family—banishment from parents, siblings, and the Church—that forces Violet to discover her own identity, to break the powerful spell of family, and to emerge from her long exile as a “rat” into a transformed life.

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Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth?

Is telling the truth ever a mistake, and is lying for one’s family ever justified? Can one do the right thing but bitterly regret it?

My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at age twelve, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an African American boy by her older brothers. In a succession of vividly recalled episodes, Violet contemplates the circumstances of her life as the initially beloved youngest child of seven Kerrigan children who inadvertently “informs” on her brothers, setting into motion their arrests and convictions and her long estrangement.

Arresting and poignant, My Life as a Rat traces a life cast away from family—and from parents, siblings, and the Church—that forces Violet to discover her own identity, to break the powerful spell of family, and to emerge from her long banishment as a “rat” into a transformed life. |

“Oates’s novel adroitly touches on race, loyalty, misogyny, and class inequality while also telling a moving story with a winning narrator. This book should please her fans and win her new ones.” - Publishers Weekly

"Oates explores the long echoes of violence born of sexism and racism in one young woman’s life in this deft psychological thriller." - Kirkus Reviews

"A beautiful and frightening novel, even with its gaps and liberties taken, it leaves readers with a sorrow and a cautious hope for Violet’s survival." - Bookreporter.com

"This is a gripping coming-of-age story, at turns horrifying, heartbreaking, poignant and buoying. Now in her late 70s, she is at the height of her powers, and America has never needed her piercing observations more than it does now." - Toronto Star