Daily Nebraskan

Issue date: 2/19/08 Section: News

Joy Castro [Click to enlarge]

The red book is inconspicuously jammed in between hundreds of others. Other books in blues, greens and yellows, keep the red cover of "The Truth Book" from standing out. There is nothing immediately eye-catching about this memoir, though it is silently screaming to be read.

Joy Castro, the author of the memoir and an associate professor of English and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, may not be immediately recognizable as a person with a memoir to write.

The 230-page book shares her life experiences of adoption, sexual and physical abuse, drugs, childbirth in college and a father's suicide.

***

Castro was adopted into a Cuban-American family of Jehovah's Witnesses four days after she was born in 1967. She moved between Miami and Ascot, England, before her family finally settled in rural West Virginia when she was 7.

Because Castro was adopted, she began to feel different from other people during her childhood.

"You just don't look the same or move the same or you don't have the same tastes or interests. You know, just all sorts of things where you feel a little bit like an alien," she said.

Castro's adoptive parents divorced when she was young, and her father was forced to leave the Jehovah's Witnesses because he smoked cigarettes. Her mother married another Jehovah's Witness, who began to abuse Castro and her little brother.

Her mother's unwillingness to remove them from the situation still affects their relationship.

"I've never felt safe around her," Castro said. "It wasn't until I became an adult that I was able to be around her and not feel very unsafe because I knew I could take care of myself and I didn't have to rely on her in any way."

Her adoptive father was able to gain custody of Castro and her brother when she was 14.

Then she left the Jehovah's Witnesses. Castro said she always questioned the religion.

"I quit at 15, and I quit for good, but there's a holdover when you leave a religion," she said. "Some of those deep structures of belief, they linger, and you are like, 'Whoa, I'm 25, I thought I rooted this out of my psyche,' or 'I'm 30, what am I doing thinking this?' I think it's a really long process."

Castro worked through the pain of her childhood and earned a bachelor's degree from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, in 1990 and her master's and doctorate degrees from Texas A&M University in '92 and '93, respectively. All three degrees were in English literature.

But her college experience also was tangled in disorder. Castro tried marijuana, ecstasy and LSD during her first years at Trinity University.

"When I went to college in 1984, Nancy Reagan's 'Just Say No' was not really on our horizon," Castro said. "I got to college and it was sort of like a big drug buffet."

An unplanned pregnancy forced Castro to reevaluate her priorities, and she quit drugs and smoking.

"I think it's very healing to love someone in a simple way," Castro said. "To care for them and be kind to them. And they love you back, how amazing is that?"

Laura White, a former teacher of Castro's at Trinity University and an Associate Professor of English at UNL, said Castro faced a lot of stress being a young mother and a college student. White, who has a son of the same age as Castro's child, invited Castro to dinners to show her that she could excel at both.

"She valued the idea that you could go to graduate school when you have children," White said. "That gave her heart."

***

After Castro's father shot himself a few years ago, her heart was broken.

Before her father's death, Castro felt she could only write the now-published memoir if everyone in her life had died.

"Not very much longer after that my father killed himself. He did die, and then I thought 'Uh oh, I don't want people to die. I need to do this.'"

Although Castro wrote the memoir to deal with her pain, she is happy her story can help others.

"I'm grateful now that it happened," Castro said. "I feel lucky and grateful, and it's a hard thing to do, and I'm glad that I did it. I don't know about destiny, but I know as a book it makes a difference to people."

Castro wants people in dangerous situations to know life can get better.

"Expect that it might take a while to feel really OK again. It might take a lot of work, but it's possible. You can be happy again. Just believe that. Put in the effort because you are worth it."

Helping underprivileged people is something Castro enjoys.

"I feel really lucky to have been able to free myself from some of the more difficult positions of my background and now I feel like it's my turn to help other people as I have been helped," she said.

She is a mentor for Big Brothers Big Sisters and has volunteered at 10,000 Villages, a non-profit international fair-trade store. Castro has taught in the Bard College Clemente Course in Humanities, which provides college-level humanities courses to the underprivileged for credit at no charge.

"It's just a chance for a lot of people who grow up poor or grow up abused or grow up denigrated, feeling in one way or another not worthy," Castro said. "That's why I like taking all of the great stuff that we have in college and taking it out there to the community."

White, who describes Castro as gracious, funny, witty and wise, is impressed by how unaffected she seems to be by her life experience.

"I was amazed that out of such a challenging childhood, she had emerged so beautifully unscathed."

jessieevertson@dailynebraskan.com

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