A Normal Life - by Kim Rich (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A memoir of a daughter of an Alaskan mobster and a troubled showgirl, in pursuit of living a normal life despite her unconventional childhood"--

Book Synopsis

After an unconventional childhood that ended in the tragic death of her mother and the murder of her Alaskan mobster father, Kim Rich was left on her own at the young age of fifteen to fend for herself. Ever since then, she began a nearly lifelong pursuit in chasing what most others had-a normal life.

Rich tugs at your heartstrings as you follow her journey toward normalcy, from her teen years, freshly orphaned, through her high school years spent couch-surfing at local families' homes, then through her college years, a failed first marriage, and a rising career as a journalist. Through frank and down-to-earth storytelling, Rich also tells of her grandfather's kidnapping, a frightening health crisis, and a six-year attempt to have children.

Picking up right where her first memoir, Johnny's Girl, left off, A Normal Life recounts the author's vivid story of being an ordinary girl faced with extraordinary circumstances-at seemingly every turn in life-with grace, humility, and wit.

Review Quotes

"Rich's mother was a stripper; her father, a gambler; her home, an after-hours casino. For Ginger and Johnny, Anchorage in the 1960s and 1970s was perfect, a place of frontier law and frontier lawlessness. Money came easy. If it went easy, too, there would always be more. But the life took its toll: Ginger died in a mental hospital; Johnny was murdered over a soured "massage-parlour" deal. In this riveting memoir, Rich digs into her own memories, court documents, and medical reports to extract her parents' lives and deaths. In sharp, reportorial prose, she shows us the nether side of the mythic frontier, a place wild but without wilderness." -Booklist (Johnny's Girl)

"In this engaging memoir, the author, a journalist probes her late parents' past." -Publisher's Weekly (Johnny's Girl)

"Rich describes in rich detail her unusual and unstable childhood but skimps on her life after her parents' deaths. How did she survive? Why did she become a journalist? Perhaps she can tell us in the next book. Strongly recommended." -Library Journal (Johnny's Girl)

"Rich does an amazing job of searching out legal and hospital records, plus letters and diaries of her dead parents, and of interviewing cops, lawyers, former B-girls, and family members, -all in an effort to lay to rest the ghosts within her...Compelling." -Kirkus Review (Johnny's Girl)

"Some books in the true crime genre transcend the formula, and JOHNNY'S GIRL does just that." -Los Angeles Times Book Review

"The grittiest, most memorable Alaskan story I've ever read. An evocative and deeply moving memoir of a most unusual family." -Joe McGinniss, author of Fatal Vision (Johnny's Girl)

"This memoir poses the question, 'Which offenses from our childhood are forgivable and which ones are not?' [Rich's] book is...the story of a gutsy child's survival, the kind that should go straight to the heart." -New York Times Book Review (Johnny's Girl)

About the Author

Kim M. Rich is the author of Johnny's Girl the nationally acclaimed memoir of growing up in Alaska's underworld as the only child of gambler John F. "Johnny" Rich and exotic dancer, Frances "Ginger" Rich. Johnny's Girl chronicles Alaska's mean streets and her parent's tragic lives cut short. Rich's father was murdered when she was 15; her mother had died a year later in a psychiatric institute. The book was reviewed and featured by, among others, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, NPR, Glamour magazine and Entertainment Weekly. The book was adapted into a Hallmark film starring Treat Williams which aired on ABC and is still in syndication. Rich's undergraduate studies were in Journalism. She began her career with the Pulitzer-Prize winning Anchorage Daily News. She possesses an M.F.A. in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University. She continues to write and teach college. She currently lives in Lafayette, LA, with her husband and three teen daughters.