Often charming, occasionally irritating, eventually gratifying.
Spotty though often lively memoir of the author’s decision to become a single mother.
In March 2000, 35-year-old Soiseth (Creative Writing/Sarah Lawrence Coll.) was just finishing grad school. “Fat, feeling like crap,” she was “in no place to go forth and get what I really want: a family of my own.” Her weight seemed to be a barrier to this goal, so she lost more than 100 pounds. Getting her life in order seemed the next obvious step, so she learned how to keep her house tidy and her bills paid. Then all she had to do was meet Mr. Right, but after some determined Internet dating and a breakup with someone who wasn’t ready for kids, she decided at 39 that waiting to find the perfect man might keep her waiting too long. Back to the Internet she went, this time to find the perfect sperm donor. “Once I buy this sperm, that’s it. I’m letting go, FOREVER, of the dream I had for my life,” writes the author. “I need to cry a little about my lost dream. I need to mourn the death of romance.” She eventually settled on a blond, skinny, six-foot-tall Dane, but there was little time for mourning after his sperm arrived packed in dry ice; she became pregnant with the first implantation attempt. The author does not gloss over her pregnancy’s negative aspects: nausea, breast tenderness and a diagnosis of pre-eclampsia that led to induced labor. After a few days of post-birth euphoria, being a single parent proved no picnic. Sleeplessness, blocked milk ducts, nighttime feedings and sky-high day-care rates were among the trials Soiseth experienced, not to mention the difficulty of explaining to little daughter Kaj why she had no daddy. While the author often strays into self-pity and stays there too long, there is genuine sweetness in her search to understand both her own history and her need to parent.
Often charming, occasionally irritating, eventually gratifying.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58005-222-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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