Although a little goes a long way, Uhle’s book will hit home with many readers.
An affecting portrait of a definitively dysfunctional family.
Uhle’s mother isn’t quite dead when Uhle walks into a florist’s and begins to make arrangements for a wreath, something that appalls the flower people. But, writes Uhle, executive director of the publishing company McSweeney’s, “mourning my mother and father was an endeavor that started so long ago that I couldn’t properly recall it.” What she was really mourning, she adds, was “reality and sanity, the facts as they appeared to everyone on Earth except my parents.” The insanity comes in many forms, some developing over many years. Mom, raised in modest circumstances, was a hoarder who even saved the morphine that Uhle’s father, dying of cancer, was supposed to take but didn’t: “Mom’s interest in the morphine was as nonsensical as her interest in accumulating anything else.” Mom piled up fabric, clothing, and especially food that frequently went to waste—and this in a household perpetually in financial straits, so much so that at one point the parents sneak the family out of their West Virginia apartment in the middle of the night to skip out on rent owed, making a new home across the line in Pennsylvania for a time, always trying to stay a step ahead of the creditors and collection agencies. Dad turns out to be a great dreamer and schemer, always feckless—and, in the end, criminal. Uhle’s memoir is a car-wreck sort of book in which we crane our necks to see what awful thing is going to happen next to disrupt her and her siblings’ lives. The memoir is well written, if at times distractingly repetitive, perhaps because her parents’ behavioral problems play out in much the same way incident after incident. Still, it has virtue in showing that no matter how odd one’s own family, there’s always someone, more often than not, who has an odder family still.
Although a little goes a long way, Uhle’s book will hit home with many readers.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781668083444
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Summit
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.
An author’s trip to Venice takes a distinctly Borgesian turn.
In November 2020, soccer club Venizia F.C. offered Nigerian American author Madu a writing residency as part of its plan “to turn the team into a global entity of fashion, culture, and sports.” Flying to Venice for the fellowship, he felt guilty about leaving his immigrant parents, who were shocked to learn upon moving to the U.S. years earlier that their Nigerian teaching certifications were invalid, forcing his father to work as a stocking clerk at Rite Aid to support the family. Madu’s experiences in Venice are incidental to what is primarily a story about his family, especially his strained relationship with his father, who was disappointed with many of his son’s choices. Unfortunately, the author’s seeming disinterest in Venice renders much of the narrative colorless. He says the trip across the Ponte della Libertà bridge was “magical,” but nothing he describes—the “endless water on both sides,” the nearby seagulls—is particularly remarkable. Little in the text conveys a sense of place or the unique character of his surroundings. Madu is at his best when he focuses on family dynamics and his observations that, in the largely deserted city, “I was one of the few Black people around.” He cites Borges, giving special note to the author’s “The House of Asterion,” in which the minotaur “explains his situation as a creature and as a creature within the labyrinth” of multiple mirrors. This notion leads to the Borgesian turn in the book’s second half, when, in an extended sequence, Madu imagines himself transformed into a minotaur, with “the head of a bull” and his body “larger, thicker, powerful but also cumbersome.” It’s an engaging passage, although stylistically out of keeping with much of what has come before.
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781953368669
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
Of most interest to dyed-in-the-wool lovers or haters.
“Not a Cinderella story.”
Baldwin’s loosely written memoir is about motherhood and pregnancy loss, marriage to a celebrity, being the target of gossip and criticism, the experiences of neurodivergency and bilingualism, and more. “When Alec and I met, I was twenty-seven and he was fifty-three,” she writes. “Now, it’s nearly a decade and a half later….People always ask me: What is life actually like with seven kids (and an Alec)? It’s amazing and chaotic.” This book comes on the heels of the first season of the family’s reality show, The Baldwins, seemingly designed to answer the same burning question. While the author seems like a nice, well-meaning person, one comes away from this memoir hoping the television version, with the story sculpted by professionals, is the more entertaining response. Given the fact that there has been controversy about Baldwin’s background, perhaps she should have written a straightforward autobiography. But she has not, and the reader might need to do some research to understand the nature of some of the attacks she writes about. The veracity of her Spanish identity has come under fire, as her birth name is Hilary, she was born in Boston, and is not of Latine descent—but you won’t learn those facts from this book. The author’s relative youth, her choice to have her sixth child via surrogate, and Alec Baldwin’s involvement in the death of a colleague on a film set have all been media fodder. She discusses several specific nemeses without naming them, which is not very interesting. “I grapple with the question: Why am I here in the public space? Why am I ‘relevant’? Am I here because an actor fell in love with me? Am I here because I’m a yoga teacher and have things to say about mental and physical health? Am I here because I had a lot of kids?” It’s not clear that she knows, and neither will you.
Of most interest to dyed-in-the-wool lovers or haters.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781668009987
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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