Leo Rising Scorpio Moon

In the middle of Detroit — literally surrounded by it, a sovereign two square miles unto itself — sits Hamtramck. In the 1960s and 1970s it was one of the most densely populated cities in America: a thunderous, aromatic, deeply Catholic enclave of Polish immigrants and their American-born children, a place where everyone spoke two languages, kept a garden, and knew exactly which neighbor made the best golabki. A place where the church bell told you what time it was and the factory whistle told you when to go home. A place like nowhere else in the world.

It is also where Donna Sutherland grew up. And her childhood was not the postcard version.

Leo Rising Scorpio Moon: From Hamtown to 8 Mile is Donna’s searingly honest, often darkly funny, deeply moving memoir of what it was like to come of age in Hamtramck while living inside the particular chaos of a home governed by a mentally unstable mother. Where other children had stability and routine, Donna had unpredictability and the constant low hum of tension that comes from never quite knowing what the day will bring. Where other mothers baked bread and attended PTA meetings, hers operated by a different logic entirely — one that Donna spent her entire childhood trying to decode and her entire adulthood trying to understand.

And yet — she survived. More than survived. She read her way out, one library book at a time, in the quiet refuge of institutions that welcomed her unconditionally and took her to places her mother’s volatility never could. She wrote her way through. She gardened her way to peace. She built a life defined not by what she came from but by the remarkable tenacity it took to get past it.

But this memoir is not only Donna’s story. It is Hamtramck’s story. It is the story of what it meant to be a grandchild of Polish immigrants who crossed an ocean at the turn of the century with nothing but ambition and faith, who built a community so vital and so particular that it became a chapter of American history unto itself. Donna traces the cultural and historical currents that shaped her world — the assimilation pressures on Eastern European families, the racial tensions of Detroit in the 1960s, the upheaval of urban renewal that tore down her childhood home and traumatized an entire neighborhood for decades to come, and the slow, strange dispersal of a community that had once seemed permanent as the churches at its center.

The memoir spans from the late 1950s through the 1970s and beyond — from Wyandotte Street in Hamtramck to Warren, where Donna settled just north of 8 Mile Road, that iconic dividing line between Detroit and its suburbs that she has never traveled more than eleven miles from. The geography is as much a character as any person in the book: the streets, the parish halls, the factory smoke, the corner stores, the smell of kielbasa and candle wax that meant you were home.

Donna writes with the precision of a woman who has spent a lifetime paying attention and the warmth of someone who, despite everything, loves the world she came from. Her prose carries the reader effortlessly through scenes of childhood wonder and adult reckoning, through grief that is never melodramatic and humor that is never cruel. She examines themes of mental illness and its inheritance, of Catholic guilt and its strange consolations, of divorce and its aftermath, of the particular complexity of relationships between women in families where the matriarch is the source of both damage and devotion.

This is a story of survival — and of the stubborn, beautiful, specifically American belief that where you end up does not have to be determined by where you began.

Readers who grew up in Hamtramck will recognize every corner. Readers who grew up in any immigrant neighborhood — Polish, Italian, Greek, Puerto Rican, Lebanese — will recognize the texture of the life: the food, the faith, the fierce pride, the complicated inheritance. Readers who grew up in any house where a parent’s mental illness was the weather will recognize the vigilance, the dark humor deployed as a survival tool, and the particular exhaustion of being the child who learned early that she would have to take care of herself.

And readers who grew up anywhere, in any kind of childhood, will find themselves going down their own memory lane — the vivid, sensory details of Donna Sutherland’s world unlocking the doors of their own.

Leo Rising Scorpio Moon: From Hamtown to 8 Mile is a memoir that celebrates tenacity. It celebrates the immigrant dream in all its gritty, glorious, imperfect reality. It celebrates Detroit — a city that has always known how to survive. And it celebrates the human capacity to find humor, beauty, and meaning in the most unlikely places — including a childhood that was never supposed to produce someone this wise, this honest, or this irresistibly readable.

Donna Sutherland is a memoirist, poet, and short story writer whose work is rooted in the richly particular world of southeast Michigan — its immigrant neighborhoods, its working-class rhythms, and its complicated, beloved history. Her memoir, Leo Rising Scorpio Moon: From Hamtown to 8 Mile, is her debut book.

Donna grew up in Hamtramck, Michigan, the famously dense and fiercely proud Polish immigrant enclave landlocked within the city of Detroit. The granddaughter of Polish immigrants who came to America in the early twentieth century, she was raised in the cultural crosscurrents of a community holding fast to its Old World identity while navigating the turbulent changes of 1960s and 1970s urban America. She lived on Wyandotte Street in Hamtramck as a child, in a house that was later demolished during urban renewal — a loss that left a scar on the neighborhood and its former residents that has never fully healed.

After leaving Hamtramck, Donna settled in Warren, Michigan, in a house just north of 8 Mile Road, the iconic boundary between Detroit and its northern suburbs. She has never lived more than eleven miles from that line — a testament to the deep roots that keep her tethered to the world she came from, even as she has spent a lifetime reflecting on it with clear, unsentimental, and often darkly humorous eyes.

From an early age, libraries became a pleasant refuge from a chaotic home life — a place for travel to other places, times, and peoples.

A lifelong reader and devoted library advocate, Donna earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She has served as a volunteer tutor for Macomb Literacy Partners, as secretary of the Friends of the Sterling Heights Library, and has worked at the library’s used bookstore — institutions that have been, in her own words, a refuge and a second home since childhood.

Donna is an active participant in the Creative Writers Workshop at the Sterling Heights Library and has attended writers’ groups at the Shelby Township Library. She has performed at open mic events for writers across the region, sharing her work with audiences who recognize in her voice the specific texture of a life lived close to the ground, close to community, and close to the complicated truth.

Before her retirement, Donna worked as a coordinator of requests for proposals in a purchasing department. Her earlier career included roles as a bookkeeper, job description manual writer, bookstore salesperson, and human resources accounting clerk — a working life that reflects the practical, resilient, get-it-done spirit of the community that raised her.

Leo Rising Scorpio Moon: From Hamtown to 8 Mile is her honest reckoning with a childhood shaped by the volatile, unpredictable presence of a mentally unstable mother, and with the extraordinary community that surrounded and sustained her despite it all. She has described the book as equal parts dark humor, light tragedy, and historical record — a characterization that captures precisely the quality of her voice and the depth of her vision.

Donna currently lives in Sterling Heights, Michigan, where she writes, gardens, and maintains a complicated relationship with the ice cream in her freezer. She has been known to leave bottles of wine untouched on a shelf for months. The ice cream is another matter entirely.