About
Steven R. Leonard’s debut memoir is cheaper than therapy, and twice as funny. Growing up poor in Denver with eight younger siblings, he survived a 1970s childhood that reads like a survival guide for the surreal. Among the highlights? Booby-trapping his parents' cigarettes, a sibling squabble that ended with a fork embedded in his sister's face, and a chain-smoking matriarch whose strategy for dodging a bee involved getting assaulted with a shovel.
He vividly recounts the front-line miseries of growing up in a dysfunctional family: fighting over meatless spaghetti at a cramped picnic-sized dinner table, assigning weekly blame about clogged toilets, and surviving a biblical case of millennial acne that drove him to the brink of despair.
Anyone who steered an Etch A Sketch, survived a wobbly bike with no brakes, and called the Time and Temperature hotline multiple times a day out of sheer boredom understands the chaotic thrill of growing up. If you’ve ever asked yourself, “How on earth did I survive my childhood?” then “Exploding Cigarettes and Flying Forks” is a laugh-out-loud must-read book that provides some answers. And the receipts.
Meet the Leonard Family from Denver Colorado
Satire
Colorado
Denver
