"Chana Wilson's astonishing story is a hybrid of nightmare and fairy tale in which every child's worst fears and fondest hopes about their mother come true."
—Alison Bechdel,
author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
“I finished the book feeling enlarged for what I’d read, inspired and hopeful. Riding Fury Home is a beautiful and very human story of vast themes: birth, death, desire, hope, oppression overcome. Wilson tells her stories in a powerful way that brings the universal home.”
—Lambda Literary
"Chana Wilson has done a wonderful thing — putting on the page so much grief, fear, and stubborn awe-inspiring endurance. We rarely look closely at complicated relationships like the one she had with her mother, and even more rarely look at how they change over time. This is not heroes and villains, but a layered, intimate exchange in which it seems the child is never quite allowed to be a child — and yet still manages to hang onto a carefully constructed loving closeness."
—Dorothy Allison,
author of Bastard Out of Carolina
“What a difference twenty years makes. Wilson's Riding Fury Home offers us a dramatic look at what it meant for a woman to love a woman in 1950 versus what it felt like to come out in 1970 in the earliest most ebullient days of the women's movement. A remarkable story that holds out transformation as a possibility for any of us — no matter how late — and for us as a society, no matter how long in coming.”
—Laura Flynn,
author of Swallow the Ocean
“As a work of socially relevant art, this memoir is above reproach. As a historical document, it is both lamentation of a shameful past and evidence of how far we've come.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A stunning story with a redemptive ending, Riding Fury Home is full of surprises and mind-opening revelations."
—Sandy Boucher,
author of Hidden Spring
Selected as one of “The Best Bay Area Books of 2012"
—San Francisco Magazine
“From the horrors of her childhood in 1950s New Jersey to the liberating discovering of her sexual identity decades later, psychotherapist Wilson's memoir is as heartbreaking as it is uplifting. Through sharing her personal tale of forgiveness and unconditional love, Wilson breaks the silence on the trauma of oppression and the ecstasy of self-acceptance.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
