A scattershot glimpse into the American magazine scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
A former Esquire fiction editor recounts her time at the magazine and her working relationship and romance with David Foster Wallace.
Miller (The Coast of Akron, 2005) was 25 with three years’ experience in editorial assistant roles at GQ when her boss became editor-in-chief at Esquire in 1997 and hired her to be the latter’s fiction editor. During her tenure, which ended in 2006, she edited four stories by Wallace, “the fiction writer with whom I’d work the most frequently at the magazine.” For a time, they were a couple. In her debut memoir, Miller recounts her years at Esquire, her struggle to grapple with working for a men’s publication in which the “representation of women was problematic at best,” and her relationship with Wallace. Many passages movingly recount the sexism she endured, such as when, after she got the job, a male literary agent told her, “You don’t have any authority to do this job, you know”; or when she discovered that then-unknown Dave Eggers, an Esquire colleague, received twice her salary for similar work. Unfortunately, much of the narrative is unfocused and suffers from weak prose—e.g., “He obviously didn’t exactly hold me in terribly high regard”; “my grandfather, who had died six years before, was still dead.” Many passages read like lines from a romance novel: “His hand was firm, and soft, and warm”; “David promised he’d call. I hoped he’d call. I needed him to call.” Despite her focus on Wallace, we never get a satisfying sense of what made him a unique writer. For the most complete and insightful portrait of Wallace, readers should turn to D.T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. Miller’s experience as a woman at a male-dominated magazine is unique, but her rendering is flawed.
A scattershot glimpse into the American magazine scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-268241-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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