For centuries members of the ethnic group known as the Roma (and their counterparts, the Irish Travellers) have been persecuted, maligned, and literally "run out of town" time and again as accused scam artists, sleazy fortune tellers and shoddy home contractors.
"Gypsy" is the epithet thrust their way, and it's a term some Romany Gypsies find pejorative but others embrace with pride, even as some embrace the bling-obsessed party life society ascribes to them.
Certainly the media play a role here, promoting such damaging stereotypes as the norm through vehicles like the TV documentary series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding on the UK's Channel 4. Wedding proved such a hit that the US network TLC picked it up last summer, going so far as to customise its own American narration over the series' voyeuristic images of Irish Gypsy teen brides in bouffant hairdos, tiaras, and over-the-top dresses (weighing more than 30kg and even lighting up in the dark).
Now comes another shocking account of the Roma successful enough in Britain to make the leap to the international stage. Gypsy Boy: One Boy's Struggle to Escape from a Secret World, already a best-selling memoir in the UK, makes its debut on the other side of the Atlantic this month together with a new title, Gypsy Boy: My Life in the Secret World of the Romany Gypsies. Yet unlike the TV series, the book is a sobering and compelling portrait of Gypsy life that is written by an insider.
This particular portrait is also somewhat terrifying: if Gypsy Boy's author is to be believed, Roma and Traveller caravan camps such as the ones he grew up in, in Berkshire and Nottinghamshire, are steeped in violence, the systemic abuse of women and thievery against "grunters", or "Gorgia" (non-Gypsy) retirees. "Almost all Gypsy men are violent," writes Mikey Walsh (a pseudonym used for his own protection). "It's ingrained in the culture and the life they lead, and impossible to avoid." Sadly, for young Mikey, his father Frank was more brutish than most, expecting his son to maintain their family's long-time possession of the county's championship crown for bare-knuckled fighting. Mikey was only four when Frank initiated his "training", raining full-force blows down upon the little boy, to "teach" him to withstand pain and humiliation. To be "a man".
As a result, he became a walking-wound of bruises, swollen lips and eyes and endured his father's "training" abuse for years. Yet his horrified mother and older sister could only watch: "Women were strictly forbidden from 'mollycoddling' boys in case they compromised the tough masculinity that was expected of Gypsy men," Walsh writes.
Nor was this the only rigid rule controlling the two genders. In Britain's Gypsy world, women don't work outside the home, so they spend their time instead watching old TV reruns, chain smoking and obsessively cleaning their caravans, typically in full-dress regalia: "full makeup, Gucci mini-dresses and Jimmy Choos". Romany girls are raised to be tough and foul-mouthed - "experienced smokers at 10" - Walsh writes.
Nor can Gypsy women be choosy. They are expected to marry between 16 and 18, having had no more than four boyfriends "to sample" beforehand. Gypsy boys prefer marrying girls who have never even been kissed. So, should the girls slip beyond that point, they may never marry. And if their teenage marriages fail, they are used goods no longer attractive to other men.
In this world, Mikey struggles with his own "training" sessions, which, he concludes matter-of-factly, succeed on at least one level: he learns to withstand his father's punches and attacks - with belts, sticks, boot heels, even his sister's Barbie dolls - without crying or flinching. And his stoicism only enrages Frank more. "In truth, my father wasn't testing me or training me, he was punishing me for failing him," Walsh writes. "I wasn't the son he dreamed of, and he was never going to forgive me for that."
Actually Mikey was something else besides the weedy weakling his father despised: he was gay, an identity that could easily have led to him being killed in the ultra-masculine, ultra-homophobic Gypsy world, had he acted on it or acknowledged it.
So, as a young teen, the author struggled to keep his secret before finally making his break at age 15 - a decision he knew would make him an outcast from the Gypsy community forever and an act that prompted his furious father to put a bounty on his head.
In the meantime, there were moments even darker than those constant beatings: an uncle named Joseph, "an ugly, moody mountain of a man" regularly isolated young Mikey at his scrapyard for repulsive, painful incidents of abuse.
Certainly, these memories are difficult to read and, like a road accident, hard to look away from - Walsh is that good a writer. Yet just when you are ready to give up on him, he moves you to some other, lighter aspect of Gypsy life like "Aunt Minnie".
"Aunt Minnie would exit her Ford Capri in an avalanche of smoke, ash and tumbling, floor-length, hand-me-down mink coat," Walsh recalls. Her coat "would get caught up in the sharp points of her red high heels as she clicked along the tarmac towards our trailer door." Minnie had married an Elvis lookalike from Birmingham incapable of supporting his young bride, so she dusted herself off - or the mink at least - and reinvented herself as a womenswear thief. With Mikey and his sister in tow, plus a young cousin or two, and a pram holding Minnie's own child, she would drive to a clothes shop, supervise the controlled theft of multiple outfits, hightail it out to her car, and then immediately resell the stolen goods at bargain-basement prices at the Gypsy camp: "There was always a queue for her wares."
Walsh applies a similar, tongue-in-cheek touch to other aspects of Gypsies' lives: like their opulently decorated caravans - "monstrosities, created to mimic miniature palaces; garish, flamboyant, and overtly camp" and heavy in polished steel, mirrored cabinets and chrome. Outside: an eight-foot-high red-brick wall enclosing the husband's souped-up van or truck, with baby boots or boxing gloves hanging from the mirror as a sign to other Gypsies not to steal from their own. Inside the caravans: Roman statues, trophies, miles of ruffles, and every Gypsy housewife's beloved prize: Crown Derby china.
Despite these islands of respite, the story of Gypsy Boy is filled with sorrow. While the writer never stoops to sentimentality, he does describe several adults along the way who tried to help: there was Kevin, a homeless man whom Mikey's father employed as a workman, or dossa, in his repaving scams, who befriended the boy but provided only a brief ray of hope: Kevin died in an electrocution accident. And there was Mrs Kerr, a good-hearted teacher who spotted the bruises from Mikey's abuse and the red-frilled underpants his father forced him to wear - yet instead of alerting the authorities, foolishly called his mother to come pick him up.
School was short-lived, in any case. At 11, Mikey was withdrawn from classes so that he could work. So, between his abbreviated learning and the Romany language he spoke at home, Mikey, like most Gypsy kids, had the English vocabulary of a five-year-old and couldn't read.
There was, however, one positive aspect to leaving school: an end to the ceaseless playground bullying. "No matter how well we Gypsy children behaved, no matter how much we tried to stay out of trouble, there would always be someone wanting to have a go at us," Walsh writes, "and being proud of who we were, we could never let it go."
He himself finally let it all go when he chanced to meet a barman named Caleb. Following a series of edge-of-your-seat events, Caleb and Mikey plotted the Gypsy boy's escape from his brutal father, and his eventual survival, staying one step ahead of the bounty hunters searching for him.
Mikey Walsh, now in his 30s, still lives by his pseudonym and covers his face for photos; he's reconciled with his father, he's said in interviews, but continues to fear the macho men of his native culture. In 2011, Walsh published a sequel in Britain, titled Gypsy Boy on the Run (Hodder & Stoughton) and he says he's now finished with his story. But the Gypsy life is not finished with him. "The Gypsy race is an old-fashioned and, sadly, a very bitter one," he wrote in his first book. "They live, breathe, sleep, grieve, love and care for only their own people. They don't like or trust the ways of others and don't have contact or friendships with other races, afraid that one day they will be forced to turn their backs on their once proud way of life and become like any other."
That would be a shame because, absent the scams and brutality and teenage brides, Gypsy culture is a colourful, ancient one we are lucky, via Mikey Walsh, to gain a peek at - behind the lace curtains of those opulent caravans before they pull up stakes, en route to their next campground.
Joan Oleck is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, New York.