A mixed bag of a graphic memoir. Alternadad, meet Indie-mom.
A graphic narrative provides a hipster’s guide to motherhood.
A spate of books has illuminated the current father, the guy who still likes to rock (to what has henceforth been dubbed “Dad Rock”), drink craft beer, and identify as much with the guy he was as the man he has become. Graphic artist Flake (These Things Ain't Gonna Smoke Themselves: A Love/Hate/Love/Hate/Love Letter to a Very Bad Habit, 2007, etc.) provides the feminine perspective, direct from “Brooklyn…ground zero for [every] manner of parenting craziness.” In a chronological series of short essays that combine personal experience, how-to advice, and a self-deprecating, frequently profane sense of humor, she takes readers from “Trying to Conceive, Sorta” through toddlerhood. The expectant mother might blanch at much of this—the changes ahead, the prospects ahead for sex, rest, and finding time to work or even breathe—but much of it might seem funnier after the fact. “This is not a parenting manual,” the author insists. “I do not have any words of wisdom or sage advice for parents.” The text is more like a change-of-pace interlude to the full-color illustrations, some of them four-panel comics but many of them full-page stand-alones without captions. As she deals with everything from bodily changes through the trimesters and various types of baby showers through preschool, playgrounds, and relations with more vigilant mothers, Flake retains her club-girl spirit. “Saved by Rock and Roll,” the penultimate chapter/essay, describes the feeling of how she “just didn’t want to hear certain songs, I wanted to be annihilated by them. It was a very physical thing to me, then; it ran on a parallel track to sex but was not quite the same thing.” And now? “Those fires have been tamped down in places and redirected in others.” Her daughter increasingly becomes a presence in the narrative, and the father remains mostly behind the scenes, with the focus throughout on the mother.
A mixed bag of a graphic memoir. Alternadad, meet Indie-mom.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-5823-0
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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