Skip to main content

Little Sister: A Memoir

About the Book

Little Sister: A Memoir

Recently featured on "CBS This Morning"!

Imagine an 18-year-old American girl who has never read a newspaper, watched television or made a phone call. An 18-year-old-girl who has never danced --- and this in the 1960s.

It is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Leonard Feeney, a controversial (soon-to-be excommunicated) Catholic priest, has founded a religious community called the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The Center's members --- many of them educated at Harvard and Radcliffe --- surrender all earthly possessions and aspects of their life, including their children, to him. Patricia Chadwick was one of those children, and LITTLE SISTER is her account of growing up in the Feeney sect. 

Separated from her parents and forbidden to speak to them, Patricia bristles against the community’s draconian rules, yearning for another life. When, at 17, she is banished from the Center, her home, she faces the world alone, without skills, family or money but empowered with faith and a fierce determination to succeed on her own, which she does, rising eventually to the upper echelons of the world of finance and investing.  

A tale of resilience and grace, LITTLE SISTER chronicles, in riveting prose, a surreal childhood and does so without rancor or self-pity.

Little Sister: A Memoir
by Patricia Walsh Chadwick

  • Publication Date: April 28, 2020
  • Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction
  • Paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Post Hill Press
  • ISBN-10: 1642933554
  • ISBN-13: 9781642933550