Rhodes and his brother spent their days rummaging through trash cans for food, loitering in shops to escape the winter's cold, and wandering the underground sewer pipes to kill time until they were allowed back inside the house. Their new stepmother so passionately resented the boys' presence that she begrudged their every bite of food, made them sleep in a concrete storeroom behind their apartment, and barred them from the house until dark. Too young to comprehend her suicide, Rhodes nevertheless became aware of a yawning emptiness that he later described as a ""hole in the world."" Rhodes and his brother, Stanley, spent the next nine years in a series of Kansas City boardinghouses with their father until he remarried and the brothers' world was shattered again. ""When I was thirteen months old, my mother killed herself,"" Rhodes begins. Another stunning work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rhodes-this one an account of his personal triumph over a childhood of deprivation and abuse.
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