From a critically acclaimed performance artist, a funny, vivid, and ultimately heartbreaking memoir about forging identity in the chasm between cultures and classes
Anya Liftig grew up with a foot in two very different worlds: While her mother’s upbringing was so rural that the other kids called her “holler rat,” her father came from a comfortable, upper-middle-class Jewish family. Anya spent school years in affluent Connecticut and summers in the holler. Shaped by the experience, she would go on to win a scholarship to Yale and become an acclaimed artist, using provocative performances to explore the contradictions and unanswered questions of her life. But when the world Anya was building for herself shattered, she was forced to reconcile where she’d come from with who she was and who she wanted to be.
In Holler Rat, Liftig masterfully interweaves family lore from her Appalachian childhood with her performance art pieces and
