Jessica Pappas is a memoirist and screenwriter who runs a Hollywood casting agency. She divides her time between Los Angeles and Greece.
THE half i keep – A MEmoir
The half i keep is a deeply moving, vibrantly rendered memoir in which the author expertly walks the tightrope between revisiting experience recollected in tranquility and dropping the reader head first into searing and indelible scenes.
raising herself while her charistmatic me-generation parents “find themselves”—Jess bravely wrestles with a past haunted by secrets, looks for love in all the wrong places, and finally comes full circle to find home.
Early praise for The the half i keep
Jessica Pappas’s The Half I Keep will have former latchkey kids everywhere uttering a hearty “Yes! Me too!” at numerous points during the read. Her seemingly comfortable upbringing was like so many childhoods of the ‘70s and ‘80s: an ocean of tranquility on the surface, replete with jagged rocks just beneath the gently lapping waves. Neither self-pitying nor self-lacerating, but always self-aware, this memoir is an essential examination of the Me Decade and the parents who left their children adrift amidst the detritus of their self-absorption. You’ll definitely laugh, and you’ll probably cry, but you absolutely won’t be sorry you took this ride with her.
—David Kukoff, author of Children Of The Canyon and Los Angeles in the 1970s