Occasions of Sin - Tapa dura

"Few writers capture feelings of yearning and disappointment as palpably as Scofield."

In 1959, when Snadra Scofield was 15, she came home to stay in West Texas after years in Catholic boarding schools. She believed her presence would inspire her invalid mother to live. What she found - a fractured family; a distracted, dying mother - nudged her into the tumult of late adolescence and the awakening of her sexuality. More than 40 years later, Scofield looks back on her Catholic girlhood and the ways in which her relationship with her mother was grounded in their intertwined aspirations for holiness, achievement and love. Writing on the brink of old age, she looks back ruefuly but without bitterness, forgiving both her mother's frailty and her own.