Confessions of Joan the Tall: A Memoir

A memoir written in the voice of a twelve-year-old Irish Catholic girl living in the Bronx in 1954, Confessions recounts one year in the life of Joan, a very tall, religious, funny, self-conscious, emotional imprisoned, lovable girl whose journey takes her from innocence, isolation, and inhibition to the beginnings of freedom and awakening.

As the founder of CavanKerry Press, Joan Cusack Handler is a poet and memoirist, a psychologist in clinical practice, and a blogger for PsychologyToday.com (“Of Art and Science”). Her poems have been widely published and have received awards from The Boston Review and five Pushcart nominations. A Bronx native, she has four published books with CavanKerry –GlOrious (2003), The Red Canoe: Love In Its Making (2008), Confessions of Joan the Tall: A Memoir (2012), and Orphans (2016) – and currently resides in Brooklyn and the East Hamptons. Joan is married to a great man and fellow psychologist, has a loving son and daughter-in-law, and two amazing granddaughters.

Confessions of Joan the Tall is a truly remarkable book.  It captures both the complex emotions of an adolescent in an ethnic, working-class neighborhood, and the unwritten social and spiritual rules of 1950s American Catholicism.   Somehow, though told in the voice of a young girl, the story has about it a psychological and emotional subtlety and complexity that is fully mature.  It’s impossible not to like Joan, impossible not to feel for her in the depths of her coming of age struggles, and impossible for anyone raised in a devout Catholic family to keep from smiling and nodding at the author’s insights into the Roman Catholic mindset.  It’s a book that can be enjoyed by anyone between the ages of ten and a hundred—Catholics and non-Catholics alike– a real literary achievement that I both enjoyed and admired.  I wanted it to go on and on.
— Roland Merullo

Confessions of Joan the Tall is a splendid book, and Joan the Tall is a splendid girl—brave, effervescent and vulnerable.  She flubs the rules of the Catholic church, she flubs the rules of family life, and amidst the quandaries, sins, punishments, and totally divine greedy moments in this story of her Irish American family, she grows into what tallness can mean—the ability to see from a mountaintop.  From her devout father to her feisty mother, from her well-groomed sister to her brothers–both bullies and allies–and from her big shoes to her fabulous white bathing suit, Joan grows, showing us (and herself) what it means to be larger than life.
— Molly Peacock

In this memoir, Handler creates a vivid portrait of a particular place and time, a Catholic neighborhood in the Bronx in the early 1950s.  The author writes in the voice of a younger self, recording daily adolescent life in a diary, where she struggles with issues of physical image, popularity, family loyalty, right and wrong, and all in the context of a community bound together by a common faith. We ache for Joan as she stands alone at a local dance, pretending to read the notices on the bulletin board.  And we feel tremendous pleasure as she begins to grow beyond the confines of her world and to glimpse the alluring promise of future happiness.
— Michelle Blake

An unflinching evocation of a Catholic girlhood. In short chapters that touch on nodes of great feeling, she summons up both torment and tenderness. The reader is ushered into a world which reaches from the rooms of her Irish immigrant house in the Bronx to the mysteries of religious feeling. The narrator is beautifully alive to the endless hazards, complications and indignities of growing up. So much of the wisdom of childhood lies in the strange blend of endurance and enchantment. Joan Handler has a sure feeling for both.
— Baron Wormser

We are engrossed by the often painful story of a child trapped in an obedience-based working class Catholic family, a demanding and usually unforgiving Church, and an environment seeming devoid of gentleness and pleasure. Unforgettable.
— Mickey Pearlman

November 2012
246 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$21
ISBN 978-1-933880-33-4
Ebook ISBN 978-1-933880-37-2
Memoir