Salon.com > Leanne Italie

Justin Bieber’s mom writes a memoir about her abusive childhood

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 20:45:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — Pattie Mallette was 18, living in a home for pregnant girls after years of unrelenting sex abuse and depression when she gave birth to a boy she thought she'd name Jesse, a boy whose first cry sounded like a song.

Well, the baby seemed more like a Justin after he popped out. And his last name isn't Mallette.

It's Bieber.

You'd have to be firmly under a rock not to know at least a little bit about Justin Bieber's YouTube-to-riches story, his loyal fan base of Beliebers, 28 million Twitter followers or the hordes of screaming girls who pack his tours.

What you probably don't know are his mother's struggles, starting with the painful divorce of her parents, through years of emotional turmoil and hard partying that made school a blur, and her eventual turn to God after a suicide attempt about six months before Justin was conceived.

Mallette, 37, has laid bare her past in a new book, "Nowhere but Up: The story of Justin Bieber's Mom," out recently from the inspirational publisher Revell. It's a powerful, plainspoken story, written in collaboration with A.J. Gregory, a mother herself. A portion of proceeds have been promised to shelters like the one that harbored Mallette in Canada when her mother kicked her out of the house after she got pregnant.

F-bomb makes it into mainstream dictionary

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 22:08:52 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — It's about freakin' time.

The term "F-bomb" surfaced in newspapers more than 20 years ago but will land Tuesday for the first time in the mainstream Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, along with sexting, flexitarian, obesogenic, energy drink and life coach.

In all, the company picks about 100 additions for the 114-year-old dictionary's annual update, gathering evidence of usage over several years in everything from media to the labels of beer bottles and boxes of frozen food.

So who's responsible for lobbing F-bomb far and wide? Kory Stamper, an associate editor for Merriam-Webster, said she and her fellow word spies at the Massachusetts company traced it back to 1988, in a Newsday story that had the now-dead Mets catcher Gary Carter talking about how he had given them up, along with other profanities.

But the word didn't really take off until the late '90s, after Bobby Knight went heavy on the F-bombs during a locker room tirade.

"We saw another huge spike after Dick Cheney dropped an F-bomb in the Senate in 2004," and again in 2010 when Vice President Joe Biden did the same thing in the same place, Stamper said.

London Olympics lead to gold-medal procrastination

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 12:34:46 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — Chores piling up. DVRs stuffed and groaning with unwatched favorites. Late, bleary strolls into the office.

Welcome to the Great Olympic Time Suck, that unsung sport that has millions glued to coverage of the London Games rather than tending to real life.

At 34-year-old Angie Butcher's house in suburban Chicago, the suck looks like this:

"Dishes are not getting done. Kids are not getting baths at night. Kids are up hours past bedtime," said Butcher, whose family has been watching anything and everything. "Nice summer evenings are going by and none of us are outside to enjoy it. Dinner has been picnic style on the living room rug more than once."

The suck has been so bad that her neighbors even wondered whether the family of five was out of town.

The family is far from alone. Nielsen said 29.1 million people watched NBC's Wednesday coverage, making it the 12th time in 13 nights that the audience for the London Games beat the corresponding night in Beijing.

Nearly eight in 10 Americans, in fact, have watched or followed the games either on television, online or via social networks, according to a survey done Aug. 2-5 by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

Avoiding Olympic spoilers is a sport of its own

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 20:40:50 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — Mandy Hauck turned 25 on Wednesday, but she's avoiding Facebook and her happy birthday messages to steer clear of Olympic spoilers about her favorite sport, fencing.

Hauck has also deleted her iPhone apps for CNN and ESPN, opting for news from the London Games the old fashioned way, via TV coverage that's time-delayed by NBC for prime time.

The network is making live streams of the action available in real time online. Hauck's hanging tough, though, in favor of doing actual work during the day as the marketing communications manager for a software company in Atlanta, a job that requires her to stay on Twitter while she attempts to stay away from its main page and trending topics.

"I enjoy the experience of sitting with my family and friends in front of the television and cheering for the athletes as if they were competing live," said Hauck, a former college fencer who has been following two-time American gold medalist Mariel Zagunis in London. "It's much more entertaining and enjoyable that way!"

It's also incredibly difficult with social media in full flower. Olympic spoilers have people turning off phone alerts, hiding their iPads and shushing co-workers in a search of simpler times, when screaming at the TV during nail-biting competition was a sport unto itself.

Baby Ana or Grey? Moms-to-be credit ‘Fifty Shades’

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 17:51:56 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — Will little Sophia and Jacob morph into baby Christian and Anastasia about nine months from now?

While it's impossible to declare a "Fifty Shades of Grey" baby boomlet, some moms and moms-to-be attribute their pregnancies to sex inspired by the erotic trilogy that went mainstream early this year.

One night on vacation in Florida was all it took for Betsy Bailey, a labor and delivery nurse, no less, in suburban Chicago. She's expecting baby number six, conceived soon after reading the steamy bondage love story.

"It was like one night alone," she laughed. "We went out to dinner and, you know, a little wine, a little stone crab and a little Christian Grey."

Brittany Woodard, 21, in Norfolk, Va., has a 6-month-old son, Greyson, whose name has absolutely nothing to do with the books Woodard read while her military husband was away for four months.

New to the spicy genre, the stay-at-home mom wasn't trying for another baby so soon, but she was ready "with many new ideas" in the boudoir department when her husband got home. She's due in February.

"We just got stationed here a couple of months ago," Woodard said, "and the week I was going to pick up my birth control we found out we were having another baby!"

Should cancer be kept secret?

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 16:46:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — In 1976, as a 24-year-old grad student, Samira Beckwith was diagnosed with the thing people still whispered about: cancer.

She was in and out of the hospital, had five surgeries and endured round after round of chemotherapy and radiation as she battled Hodgkin's lymphoma. Beyond a few professors and close friends, she didn't routinely tell people of her bleak diagnosis as she focused on staying alive.

Years later, as she was about to turn 50, disaster struck again. This time it was breast cancer and a double mastectomy. Her desire for a bit of privacy was the same, but society and sickness had become a share-all whirl.

"Back the first time around, people didn't want to hear or talk about cancer. But the boundaries changed, and the second time it was breast cancer. People really like to talk about breast cancer," said Beckwith, now 59 and clinical director of a health care services company in Fort Myers, Fla.

"But there are still many people who want to keep their illness, keep the decisions that they're making, within a close circle," she said. "They don't want to be out there on Facebook. It's almost like there's something wrong with them because they don't want to share."

2011: year of New Year’s resolution rethink?

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 20:46:00 +0000

Lori Biancofiori has been looking forward to 2011 for a long time. That's when she hopes to leave 2009 behind for good.

Her husband was laid off, her salary shrunk, the transmission blew on their car and they racked up $17,000 in credit card debt. Now, nearly three years later, her hubby's working again and up for a promotion after months of clipping coupons, slashing expenses and sticking to cash.

The Chicago couple has never been more serious about a New Year's resolution: to dig out of the hole by March.

"We want to start trying for a family in the summer," said the 33-year-old Biancofiori, who works in human resources. "We've been putting it off since fall 2009. There was no way we could afford daycare with the mess we were in."

Has the uncertainty of 2010 prompted a resolution rethink? Does vowing to lose five pounds feel downright frivolous as the Great Recession lingers for so many?

Kelli Calabrese, 41, and her husband have been up against a costly property dispute, bad investments, three home floods, two broken water heaters, a few broken bones and the demise of numerous big box appliances over the last three and a half years.

Baby slapping aboard flight sets off debate

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:36:00 +0000

America's latest folk-hero flight attendant may be the one on a Southwest Airlines jet who took a 13-month-old baby from her mother after the woman slapped the crying child for kicking her.

The flight attendant's actions, however, set off an intense debate: When and how should bystanders intervene?

"We live in such a 'mind your own business' and 'I'll sue you for getting involved' society that I feel we're afraid to stand up sometimes for the right thing," said Jen Reynolds, 38, a stay-at-home mom to 15-year-old and 16-month-old boys in Sandwich, Ill.

"We don't want to be yelled at or told to butt out," she said. "The flight attendant is definitely my hero."

Parents on both sides of the corporal punishment debate agreed that hitting a baby that young was wrong. But they also empathized with the mother, saying they've been exactly where she found herself on Monday on the Dallas-to-Seattle flight: stressed, and trapped on an airplane, with virtually no way to distract or console a child.

"My biggest question is why didn't anybody else say anything before it got to the point of the baby being slapped," Reynolds said.