The Dead Inside by Cyndy Elter Review

I never was a badass. Or a slut, a junkie, a stoner, like they told me I was. I was just a kid looking for something good, something that felt like love. I was a wannabe in a Levi's jean jacket. Anybody could see that. Except my mother. And the professionals at Straight.

From the outside, Straight Inc. was a drug rehab. But on the inside it was...well, it was something else.

All Cyndy wanted was to be loved and accepted. By age fourteen, she had escaped from her violent home, only to be reported as a runaway and sent to a "drug rehabilitation" facility that changed her world.

To the public, Straight Inc. was a place of recovery. But behind closed doors, the program used bizarre and intimidating methods to "treat" its patients. In her raw and fearless memoir, Cyndy Etler recounts her sixteen months in the living nightmare that Straight Inc. considered "healing."

Fun fact, I found this book in the local library thinking it was fiction, because it's in the fiction section. It's not. It's a memoir. But it is written like a fiction novel which makes me think fiction is in this author's future. 

In this case, the fictional feel of the memoir made it easy to read and hard to put down. I read the whole thing in one sitting, intrigued by the fucked up nature of Straight Inc. Young Cyndy was an interesting narrator, and I liked the 80s slang that peppered her voice. Also, she gets bonus points for actually managing to sound her age in the memoir. Cyndy actually seemed 13-14, not 8. I find that a lot of YA authors when writing a character that's younger than 15 make them sound like they're fresh out of elementary school, not middle school- see The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Cyndy was believable as an 80s young teen- I could imagine her with her big 80s hair and jean jacket giggling about boys at the mall with Joanna.

I also loved that it took partly in Connecticut. I didn't expect it too, and thought it was just a coincidence when Bridgeport was mentioned. But then Stamford and Norwalk and Monroe showed up, and I kind of loved that I knew everything she was talking about. I'm happy this book showed a different Connecticut than the one that usually shows up in books. Fairfield County, Greenwich, Westport, rich areas with Old Money WASPish families and the only cotillion classes available this side of the Mason-Dixon Line. Either that or charming colonial-era towns populated by lovable eccentrics straight out of Gilmore Girls. In reality, while it is true Connecticut is home to some of the richest area codes in the country and has plenty of picturesque small towns, there's a huge wealth divide, and many of the major cities are Not the Best Places to Live as a result. I mean, sure, there's a couple of exceptions- Trumbull's pretty nice for instance- but Bridgeport, New Haven (there's a reason most of the Yalies live in Woodbridge), and Hartford are pretty bad places to be late at night. We also have a lot of rural towns and old blue collar mill towns that have picked themselves back up by varying degrees after industry left America. My point is, Cyndy paints a good portrait of what the real Connecticut is. Her descriptions of Monroe as a Podunk town especially made me laugh- Monroe's on the edge of the rural area- it's not really rural, but I could see how someone from Stamford would think that. 

This book also probably contains the most glowing description of Bridgeport you will ever find. Seriously. My mother grew up in Trumbull, on the Bridgeport border actually, and worked there as an ER nurse during the AIDS epidemic- right around the time this book takes place- and the stories she could tell you. Bridgeport's probably like the estranged delinquent child of Fairfield County. I think because of that I really liked the way Cyndy thought of the city. Because Bridgeport's kind of like an amped up version of all those old mill towns. Once upon a time, it made everything from corsets to guns. It's home to PT Barnum, the Frisbie Pie Company (where the name Frisbee comes from), and Subway and what would the world be like without those things. But it got hit hard by deindustrialization and I'm afraid it hasn't changed much since '85, the year this memoir was supposed to take place. I suppose they're trying to fix it, but this is also the city that, two years ago, elected a guy as mayor who got arrested for corruption the last time he served, so I'm not really holding my breath.

Sorry, I get a little carried away with stuff like that. 

Anyway, one thing I didn't think worked entirely about this memoir is the way she switched tenses a lot, making me confused when an event took place. In fact, the whole time frame of this memoir once she got into Straight was a bit hard to follow. She would make references about events that happened "last night" even though she didn't write about them when they actually happened and, again, her tenses would get all mixed up and I'd just end up confused. Luckily, it was easy enough to not fixate on and I was able to get the gist of what was going on. Because once you get past those minor issues, the book becomes easy to read- and an interesting one at that.

So I did enjoy The Dead Inside. I mean, I didn't love it or anything, but I did find it absolutely fascinating and liked Cyndy enough. I'd recommend it if you want an easy to read memoir with an interesting subject matter.

8 out of 10