Courtney Lynn O'Donnell was born and raised in the south side, Canaryville neighborhood of Chicago. She was the daughter of a fireman, and the youngest of six. Only having one daughter, her father gave special attention to Courtney, and when he took his own life in her final year of high school, it had an everlasting affect on her. In 2006, she left the city and her brothers behind to attend Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. After setting the house of her former partner on fire in 2008, she was incarcerated. She never received her degree. The public nature of the trial expedited the publishing of her first book, There Used to be Pigs Here: an anthology of a childhood in Chicago. Over the next five years she would publish two books of poetry and her magnum opus, Kitchen Cowgirl, which will soon be made into a movie starring Robert Downey Junior as the brilliant amputee, Jed Laguaite. On January 17, 2012, O'Donnell died in prison due to complications while being treated for pneumonia.
I would see that movie
ReplyDeleteThe title of your first book is completely hilarious. Your post also reminds me of a book I read awhile back, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. I remember he dedicated the book to the worm that eats his corpse. Good stuff.
ReplyDelete"brilliant amputee" is brilliant.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.explosm.net/comics/1526/
ReplyDeleteSome people don't appreciate a good house-pimpage.