Home Fires

This is a moving and often shocking story of a passionate, intelligent woman from a wealthy Irish-Jewish family in Dublin. After years of physical and mental abuse from her unstable mother, Shivaun Woolfson fled as a teenager in the 1960s into the arms of a new age cult in Dublin, horrifying her devoutly religious father. When he and his brothers kidnapped her from this group and forced her back into the old faith, Shivaun escaped again, and moved into a house of the bass-player of a young up-and-coming band called The Boomtown Rats. When this relationship broke down, she made her way to the United States and married a Cuban in Miami, a womanizer and cocaine dealer. Although she never took or sold drugs herself, she soon became embroiled in the seedy underworld of Cuban Miami. Juan was imprisoned for drug trafficking, meanwhile, she fell in love with another man, who subjected her and her sons to violence. She struggled on in America, living close to the edge, finally gaining a degree, and then a doctorate and respect as a teacher and community activist.