“A stunning story with a redemptive ending, Riding Fury Home is full of surprises and mind-opening revelations.”- Sandy Boucher, As a historical document, it is both lamentation of a shameful past and evidence of how far we’ve come.”- San Francisco Chronicle “As a work of socially relevant art, this memoir is above reproach. 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, 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. Wilson tells her stories in a powerful way that brings the universal home.”- Lambda Literary

Riding Fury Home is a beautiful and very human story of vast themes: birth, death, desire, hope, oppression overcome. “I finished the book feeling enlarged for what I’d read, inspired and hopeful. 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, 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. “Chana Wilson has done a wonderful thing - putting on the page so much grief, fear, and stubborn awe-inspiring endurance. From the intolerance of the '50s to the exhilaration of the women’s movement of the '70s and beyond, the book traces the profound ways in which their two lives were impacted by the social landscape of their time.Įxquisitely written and devastatingly honest, Riding Fury Home is a shattering account of one family’s struggle against homophobia and mental illness-and a powerful story of healing, forgiveness, and redemption.“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 Riding Fury Home spans forty years of the intense, complex relationship between Chana and her mother-the trauma of their early years together, the transformation and joy they found when they both came out in the 1970s, and the deep bond that grew between them. It would be many years before she learned the secret of her mother’s anguish: her love affair with another married woman, and the psychiatric treatment aimed at curing her of her lesbianism. On her return, Chana became the caretaker of her heavily medicated, suicidal mother. The gun jammed and she was taken away to a mental hospital. In 1958, when Chana Wilson was seven, her mother attempted suicide, holding a rifle to her own head and pulling the trigger.

Riding Fury Home by Chana Wilson