by Adair Lara ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 2001
An honest, moving account of family life gone haywire.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Lara turns to memoir.
No one said raising teenagers was easy, but no one said it should necessarily involve drugs, truancy, alcoholism, and abortions, either. The author lived in a pretty complicated family situation even before her daughter turned 12: she and her third husband lived with her two kids in the same house with her second husband (the kids’ dad). Then Lara’s own father (who had vanished many years ago, leaving behind his wife and seven kids) moved in, too. Lara’s daughter Morgan was a happy and apparently well-adjusted girl, and her downhill slide began pretty innocently—cigarettes and a little drinking. Soon she was having sex with her boyfriend (a fact she shared with her mom over sushi), mouthing off in class, and cheating on tests at school. Lara sent her to stay with an aunt and uncle for the summer, hoping that some time away from city temptations would clean her up, but the aunt promptly sent the girl back—wary of leaving a seductive, nubile, and obviously promiscuous teenager alone with her husband. The author shows how her struggles with parenthood affected the rest of her life—her marriage became tense, and her confidence in her work began to dissolve. She and her third husband, who had contemplated having a baby, decided against it—in part because they couldn’t imagine voluntarily signing up for adolescence again. Lara finally realized that, while she will always love her daughter (even when she dies her hair purple), she will not always like her, and the story ends happily: Morgan got sober, got her life back on track, got into college, and eventually graduated. The most sympathetic character turns out not to be Lara or Morgan but Lara’s husband, Bill, caught in the middle of a family squabble to which he doesn't really belong.
An honest, moving account of family life gone haywire.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-7679-0507-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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by Helen Fremont ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2020
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
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by Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
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
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by Laura Schroff & Alex Tresniowski ; illustrated by Barry Root
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