Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker

Her aunt was a nun who popped pills and did time in Narcotics Anonymous. Her father grew up during the Depression, believed he'd be the next Frank Sinatra, and ended up working in the mills. His daughter, Lori Jakiela, spent her suburban Pittsburgh childhood watching Marlo Thomas in That Girl and dreaming of New York City.Instead, she got bad talent shows, a Junior Miss contest, and college in Erie, PA, where the big attraction was chicken wings. But years later, her Big Apple dreams were still going strong. With her twenties becoming a distant memory, Jakiela answered an airline ad promising a NYC home base, high-flying glamour, and three-day layovers in Paris. The reality was a roach-filled apartment in Queens, a polyester uniform cut like a sack, and a life that wasn't quite what she imagined.

Her 70-year-old, cancer-stricken mother kills snakes with a broom. Her best friend believes in psychics and the Virgin Mary. Her new neighbor steals her CDs and her aunt sneaks cheese curls into the house. After seven years in New York, Lori Jakiela gives up her job as an international flight attendant and her dreams of becoming a writer, and returns home to Pittsburgh to take care of her dying mother. A loving but befuddled daughter, Jakiela stumbles to find her new life while sleeping in her childhood bed and teaching writing to students who hate to read. Unexpected love, expected loss, the struggle to find our own families, THE BRIDGE TO TAKE WHEN THINGS GET SERIOUS is the story of mothers and daughters, the debts we pay, and the new lives we build for ourselves when we least expect them.

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After her adoptive mother's death, Lori Jakiela, at the age of forty, begins to seek the identity of her birth parents. In the midst of this loss, she also finds herself with a need to uncover her family's medical history to gather answers for her daughter's newly revealed medical ailments. This memoir brings together these parallel searches while chronicling intergenerational questions of family. Through her work, Jakiela examines both the lives we are born with and the lives we create for ourselves.

Takes the reader on flights through the ordinary, in which the mundane experiences of an airline attendant become something much stranger and wilder.

Winner of the 2021 Wicked Woman prize for poems that focus on a woman who somehow ''broke the mold.'' In this memoir, the speaker of the poems sees herself as such a Wicked Woman in that she defied numerous conventions, suffered, survived, and. . .was able to laugh. Readers will hope there is a bit of themselves in this tough, tender woman and poet.

"Lori Jakiela understands the rhythms at the intersections of humor and sorrow. Each time I fininshed one of these poems - populated as they are with delightful, sometimes delightfully appalling, characters - I was eager to begin the next, for more news of the human." --Daisy Fried, author of My Brother is Getting Arrested Again and more.