An unsentimental yet moving coming-of-age memoir.
A writer and life advice expert tells the story of how an unexpected teen pregnancy taught her unforgettable lessons in humility and courage.
At 17, Chicago native Pryor (What Did I Do Wrong?: When Women Don't Tell Each Other the Friendship Is Over, 2006) had everything going for her: loving parents, wealth, and, most importantly of all, a bright future. Then the high school senior discovered she was pregnant. Because her family was Catholic, abortion was not an option. Anxious to keep up appearances, Pryor’s mother, Dorothy, located a home for unwed mothers in Indiana where she left her daughter to give birth before returning to Chicago and attending graduation. Feeling trapped “in [her] body [and] her life,” Pryor immediately realized that the “home” her mother had chosen was really a government-run facility for poor and delinquent girls that looked and felt like a prison. Dorothy made special arrangements for her daughter to be able to come and go as she pleased, but this made no difference since the facility was “in the middle of nowhere.” The food was “gnarly bad,” and the “school” consisted of a single room with a few magazines and books and no teacher. Living mostly on vending machine snacks and food from care packages, Pryor felt alone and frightened among the street-wise girls she met. But soon she found that beneath the tough exteriors of her fellow mothers-to-be were fears and vulnerabilities—about pregnancy, giving birth, and life itself—that matched her own. As she drew closer to the girls, the author also came into awareness of how many more choices her socially privileged status had given her, including the one to give her baby up for adoption. Pryor’s refusal to bury the truth of her experiences is the greatest strength of her book. Her honesty about a youthful error and desire to let that honesty define the rest of her life are both uplifting and inspiring.
An unsentimental yet moving coming-of-age memoir.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9800-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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
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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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