A sardonic memoir full of unexpected anxieties—and familial love.
An actress and singer struggles through her father’s illness and the aftermath of his death.
Silber (After Anatevka, 2017), who has performed on Broadway and London’s West End, was a young child when she became aware that her father had cancer. Quickly, her life was organized around her father’s imminent passing, with systematic chemotherapy treatments, medical trials, and the threat of abandonment. “I rigorously took on the task of providing my parents with a perfect child: a singular source of hope and joy and promise,” writes the author. “It was in this internal atmosphere that I smothered myself, believing in my bones that any problem, mistake, even the tiniest of transgressions, was my contribution to not curing cancer.” The narrative moves among sections that explore what happened before, during, and after the death of her father, focusing especially on the funeral. “Funerals are a social mystery,” she writes, “a formulaic social mystery, but mysterious nonetheless….You just muddle through each funeral, hoping you’re doing the right thing, and then you largely forget about it until you have to muddle through it again the next time.” Of course, her father’s funeral was far from forgettable. Rather, it was full of memorable interactions with family members that left the author numb, shaken, and, ultimately, scarred for life. Though the subject matter of the memoir is heavy, Silber’s tone is full of optimism and irreverence, effectively keeping readers engaged as they travel through their darkest thoughts. Throughout, the author includes original haiku, frequent discussions of her favorite movie, What About Bob?, bits of scripted conversations between her and her family members, lovers, and friends, and a host of funny diagrams. “You know what’s awesome? Irony,” she writes. “People my age learned what it means from Alanis Morissette, so our grasp is tenuous at best, but when it plays out over life and death situations it can get pretty trippy.”
A sardonic memoir full of unexpected anxieties—and familial love.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-764-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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