Sleepaway School: A Memoir Book

There are family-like bonds that can form within the larger human family, when one's own family life has been broken into fragments. Such is the case throughout Sleepaway School, Lee Stringer's recounting of his years at Hawthorne Cedar Knolls—a school for kids at risk—and the events that led up to them.The clash of being poor and black in an affluent, largely white New York suburb begins to foment pain and rage which erupts, more often than not, when he is at school. One violent episode results in his expulsion from the sixth grade and his subsequent three-year stint at Hawthorne, the "sleepaway school" of the title. What follows is an intensely personal American journey: a universal story of childhood where childhood universals are missing. Excluded at first by his peers, Stringer develops an outsider's eye, enabling him to see some things more deeply from without than from within. Such insight, however, is not enough to assuage the anguish he feels over his isolation. And when this spills out Stringer finds himself in yet another, darker institution.In Sleepaway School, we experience how a child fashions his life out of the materials given to him, however threadbare. This is a boy-meets-world story, the chronicle of one child's struggle simply to be.Lee Stringer is the author of the acclaimed Grand Central Winter: Stories From the Street (Seven Stories Press, 1998), which chronicled his twelve years of crack addiction and homelessness on the streets of New York City. It has been translated into eighteen languages, and prompted Stringer's appearance on Oprah and many other national television shows, newspapers and magazines. Read More