Synopsis

Born to shanty Irish on one side and Park Avenue privilege on the other, Laura navigates a turbulent childhood filled with the alcohol-fueled abuse of her volatile father and her mother’s excessive drinking. As the middle child of three girls, she assigns herself the role of her mother’s protector, who dies when Laura is thirteen, leaving her heartbroken and adrift.

Insecure, anxious, and fearful, she tries drugs, random sex, and a sequence of lovers. Along the way she becomes a successful painter and has a bad first marriage. Nothing however seems to assuage her emptiness and her sense of loss. Eventually, she marries a caring man and has a loving daughter. It is only at the end of her life and by way of an unusual and unexpected turn of events that she is finally able to make peace with herself, to let go of the feeling that she never really grieved, and said goodbye to her beloved mother, and to appreciate that though we work at love and acceptance, sometimes the most wonderful experiences in our lives come in unanticipated and unsought ways.

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Praise

Because I tend to read fiction cinematically, I saw each chapter of Exit Wounds as fully realized scenes in a movie. It isn’t a happy book and it’s not a sad book. It’s a brave, raw story of redemption infused with clever and witty black Irish humor.   — Moritz Borman, Producer Snowden, Terminator Salvation, Basic, Savages

It manages to be harrowing and hopeful in equal measure. The scenes of a childhood defined by a brutal drunk beating a young girl’s dying mother are as scarifying as any coming of age novel I’ve read, and the scenes of a life lived in defiance of the script she was handed is no less than thrilling.    — Tom Lutz, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Creative Writing, UC Riverside/Founding Editor in Chief and Publisher of the Los Angeles Review of Books

Exit Wounds, Annie O’Neill Stein’s debut novel will draw you in, tug at your heart, and help you appreciate the subtle pleasure of black irish humor. She hooks you in with her original voice and takes you on a journey without sugar coating or apology and helps one understand the importance of an examined life.  — Bob Wallace, Former Managing Editor, Rolling Stone

Annie O’Neill Stein’s novel Exit Wounds is a striking debut. Her writing is sensory, emotionally honest, and darkly comic. Like Laura, her main character, Stein is a rule breaker. She takes the reader on a wild and satisfying ride.  — Jan Cherubin, author of Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2020, The Orphan’s Daughter

Excerpt

Chapter 2

Bless Me, Father

It was past midnight, like it usually was when the “f* yous” and “no good bastard” started. The violence of their words and of their blows was nothing new. Laura’s parents fought nightly or almost nightly for a good two-year stretch. Mostly verbal, the occasional physical jousting left her mother with black eyes, swollen purple, fading to yellow with time, and red welted arms. Her mother wore her marks silently with whatever guilt, shame, and dignity she possessed. But she was never passive.

That night it was different. Laura was there. She would’ve preferred to be fast asleep, like a normal third grader, resting up for the next morning’s spelling test, but that wasn’t an option. There she was, standing in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom, yet again. Laura could see that her mother was in no shape to do the dance that night. Her eyes looked like they needed quiet, safety. Like she wanted to sleep it off. She wanted morning. Her face was sad, not fierce, and her voice not instigating, the way it was on other nights. Laura heard a tiredness in her soul for the first time and it broke her heart.

The strap of her mother’s pink nightgown had fallen off her left shoulder. The fabric of the gown was transparent, so Laura saw all there was to see. The narrow white folds of flesh, her pubic region, and the raw red rope of a scar above it, from where the doctors had removed her three daughters. Her right breast drooped a bit lower than her left. Her arms and legs looked like white stick figures drawn by a child. At that moment her mother looked like a child. A lost, torn, and tattered child unable to enunciate her own daughter’s name.

“Lau,” there was no volume in her whispered word. “Go back to bed, sweetie. It’s okay,” she slurred, pulling her nightgown strap up her right hand, fingers fanned out, holding on to her shoulder bone like it was a branch. An exterior part of herself that might steady her. She tried to accompany her words with a small pathetic smile.

Laura left the room. Camping out in the hallway, crouching down a few feet away from her parents’ door, she prayed. “Please God, I’ll be the best girl ever, you’ll see. I’ll give all my allowance to the pagan babies starving in Africa, I’ll stop saying how much I hate Lucy, and pay attention in church on Sundays. Please,” she prayed, feeling selfish, “just make them stop so I can go back to
sleep.” The prayer was nothing but a habitual response. A way of coping with fear and fatigue. God wasn’t listening.

About the Author

Native New Yorker Annie O’Neill Stein moved to Los Angeles in the early eighties as an actress. After many small parts in TV series, from Miami Vice to Charlie’s Angels, she decided to follow her true passion, writing.

Being accepted to Sewanee Writers Conference to study with Alice McDermott planted the seed for Exit Wounds, her first novel.

Annie has written for several magazines, More, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Distinction, Folks, and was a regular contributor to The Huffington Post for several years.

One of the things she’s proudest of is leading creative writing workshops with foster teens, which led to editing and publishing Beauty From Ashes, a collection of short stories and poetry written by foster youth.

She lived in LA with her husband until her recent passing. She has two grown daughters. Like most writers, she regarded Exit Wounds as her other child.