Clear-sighted, darkly comic, and tender, The Twenty-Seventh Letter
of the Alphabet is about a daughter's struggle to face the
Medusa of generational trauma without turning to stone. Growing up
in the New Jersey suburbs of the 1970s and 1980s in a family
warped by mental illness, addiction, and violence, Kim Adrian spent
her childhood ducking for cover from an alcoholic father prone to
terrifying acts of rage and trudging through a fog of
confusion with her mother, a suicidal incest survivor hooked on
prescription drugs. Family memories were buried—even as they were
formed—and truth was obscured by lies and fantasies. In The
Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet Adrian tries to make
peace with this troubled past by cataloguing memories, anecdotes,
and bits of family lore in the form of a glossary. But within this
strategic reckoning of the past, the unruly present carves an
unpredictable path as Adrian's aging mother plunges into
ever-deeper realms of drug-fueled paranoia. Ultimately, the
glossary's imposed order serves less to organize emotional chaos
than to expose difficult but necessary truths, such as the fact
that some problems simply can't be solved, and that loving someone
doesn't necessarily mean saving them.