Screenwriter and novelist Forrest (Cherries in the Snow, 2005, etc.) delivers an intense story of madness and redemption.
Though the author, a transplanted Brit, was enjoying some success as a writer in New York City, she writes, “my quirks had gone beyond eccentric, past the warm waters of weird to those cold, deep patches of sea where people lose their lives.” She was cutting, bingeing and purging, clinging to disastrous relationships and feeling suicidal. She found help with Dr. R., but still attempted suicide soon after starting to see him. During the next decade, Dr. R. became her friend, mentor and life raft. Forrest says much about Dr. R., but concludes, “I liked how he saw me. It’s that simple.” After eight years of therapy, Dr. R. died without warning; Forrest learned of his death through an e-mail. Angered and confused by being left behind so abruptly, many of her old habits returned. Still, Dr. R.’s voice remained in her head—sometimes speaking though her cat—gently easing her pain, giving her strength. A famous movie star, GH, became her lover and just as quickly left her. Forrest’s narrative follows the now-familiar arc of being lost then found, but the profoundly precise writing sets it apart. The author provides plenty of pop-culture references and name-drops like crazy—Heath Ledger, Brad Pitt, Gloria Steinem—but readers are never sure if these people are actually there. Does she really see Monica Lewinsky each time she is crying in a West Village café? There are mysteries here, but a pervasive honesty as well. A brilliantly realized memoir of surprise and startling beauty.
Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59051-446-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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