An earnest and heartfelt memoir cloaked under a battle-toughened exterior.
A gender nonconforming cultural impresario recalls a life marked by drugs, displacement, a mentally ill mother, and rare but cherished pockets of solace.
Nothing about Wright’s three-decade life has come easy, as this eventful if narratively loose memoir has it, including her own birth—her mother endured more than 35 hours of labor and needed to be ferried through a crowd of homeless men in her scruffy East Village neighborhood. Wright’s mother, Rhonna, was a head-turning model and dancer, and Wright followed in her footsteps as a child actress. Stability was endlessly elusive: Wright’s parents split early, Rhonna was booted from their public-housing apartment, and she was prone to angry, overprotective rages when it came to her daughter. The term “daughter” is complicated as well. Though she was born a girl, Wright decided to “become a boy” when she was 6 and eventually dispensed with gender distinctions entirely. Externally, this created a host of anxieties regarding classmates and the boys and girls to which the author was attracted. Internally, Wright was a roiling sea, getting kicked out of various schools and slipping into drug-soaked jags of self-loathing. For all that struggle, though, rhetorically, the author puts on a brave face throughout the memoir, writing with a street-wise cool even when she discusses turning her mom in to the child welfare authorities or discovering her father’s heroin habit. "The foundation of my personality is the dance of regaining my balance from slamming into rules,” writes the author—which is why she’s not much for delivering familiar lectures about gender identity or surviving a tough childhood. It’s unclear how this engagingly reckless soul found the poise to launch a publishing, acting, and writing career; she just seemed to be doing it by her late teens. If Wright can pull it off, there’s hope for just about everybody.
An earnest and heartfelt memoir cloaked under a battle-toughened exterior.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-236820-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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