Deborah Auko Tendo, Fargo’s head of commercial, still weeps for her mother. So many unresolved issues there —pain, abandonment, rejection, bitterness. A broken childhood. She knows a thing or two about going through the wringer: she has lived in a sprawling slum, in a lodging with prostitutes and thugs with guns, and a church, waking up to the toiling of the bell that marked, rather loudly, another blighted day. Her mother remains a thorn in her flesh to date. How do you resolve issues with someone you never knew, someone who is dead?
Well, in no particular order, you drink copiously, you stop drinking, you go to therapy, you get married, you have children, you write a gritty, naked memoir with an oxymoron title, Rough Silk, you climb Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro in one year, “because of that constant confrontation with oneself.” You fight cancer with the one man who never let go of your hand and eventually bury him.
