A potent cautionary tale about the dangers of psychiatric misdiagnoses and the stigma of mental illness.
A collection of essays about the deleterious effects of a serious medical misdiagnosis.
When she was 18, Sawchyn, a features editor for the Rumpus, ended up in a hospital after her mother found her sitting in her room, “knees pulled into my chest, face pushed into my knees, arms wrapped around myself as far as they would go, rocking forward and back, muttering.” She was diagnosed with bipolar I. This diagnosis, she writes, “would shape the next seven years of my life,” a period during which she “lived afraid of my own mind, both what it was capable of and what others would think and do if they found out about it.” She eventually learned that she had been misdiagnosed, that her teenage “riotous self-will” and capacity for self-harm were attributable to factors that therapy and medication only made worse. In these essays, Sawchyn paints a chilling portrait of her ordeal, her strained relations with members of her biracial family, and similar struggles endured by people close to her, including a boyfriend who made several unsuccessful attempts at suicide and a graduate school classmate with “pale scars tracked up the inside of her left arm that matched those on my right.” The book’s final essays—about a roommate in the Midwest, visits to a Florida goth club, and attempts at religious education—add little to the insights that came before. Yet the author is bracingly honest throughout, as when she writes that, although she’s better now, her urge to self-mutilate remains. “My brain,” she writes, “says that if I tear my flesh, the hurt inside will stop, will mutate into a form I can salve.” Sawchyn’s gift for memorable descriptions makes her ordeal all the more visceral, as when she writes about the effects of Klonopin: “Swallowing [the pills] felt like prescription sunglasses over your whole body.”
A potent cautionary tale about the dangers of psychiatric misdiagnoses and the stigma of mental illness.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-941681-66-4
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Burrow Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
