Dyer Straits: All Those Years Ago in Dorchester, MA

Growing up in Dorchester, MA during the 1960s and ’70s meant living through some of Boston’s most turbulent years—racial tension, shifting neighborhoods, and families stretched thin by hardship. In this memoir, the author traces her childhood inside a triple-decker world shaped by addiction, mental illness, poverty, and domestic violence—and the fierce sibling bonds that helped her survive it.

At home, a mother of eight did everything she could under impossible circumstances—resourceful, steady, and determined to keep her family afloat. Her children learned early how to look out for one another, raise one another, and find light where they could. Their father, volatile and mentally ill, casts a long shadow over the household, shaping much of what the family had to endure.

Threaded through every chapter is the music that held the siblings together. From kitchen-radio singalongs to teenage bedrooms pulsing with rock and roll, music became a safe place—a shared langu...