Musician Orenda Fink on Glass Castles, Witchy Mothers, and Family Dysfunction

Send us Fan MailThe musician Orenda Fink, best known for her early 2000s band, Azure Ray, purveyors of a dreamy, confessional pop, has now penned a frank, unsparing memoir, The Witch's Daughter, in which she grapples with her complicated family story in which her mother's profound emotional needs operated as a kind of centrifugal force.  “Life with my mother was like being in a trap,” she writes. “Once you entered there was no escaping.” There is no escape, either, for the children in the  books that Fink has chosen to talk about for this episode of Shelf Life: Jeannette Walls acclaimed memoir, The Glass Castle, and the Pulitzer-Prize winning play, August: Osage County by Tracy Letts, in which the disappearance of an alcoholic patriarch unlocks a family’s secrets.