Blurring the line between biography and memoir, these essays consider the power of public personalities to illuminate one’s...
Eight writers reflect on women who fascinate them.
“Who do you think about (maybe a little too often), who challenges, inspires, or outrages you? Who are you obsessed with?” These questions inform this collection of essays, edited by Feminist editorial director Scholder (editor: Dr. Rice in the House, 2007, etc.), about famous women whom the writers see as personal icons. As they investigate the women’s lives, the essayists reflect on their own identities and what motivates their attractions. Novelist Mary Gaitskill writes about porn artist Linda Lovelace, whose public persona, Gaitskill believes, has been bowdlerized. Herself a victim of a violent rape, Gaitskill feels a visceral understanding of the “hellish combination” of anger and fear that Lovelace is likely to have experienced. “As much as anything,” she writes, “her story is about enormous loneliness and the struggle to survive, a condition so much bigger than how she was seen.” Writer and gardener Jill Nelson is incredulous that young women today have no idea who Aretha Franklin was—a woman who, for Nelson, embodied “liberated empowerment or broke down heartache, with a sultry dose of lust thrown in.” Historian, classical singer and restaurateur Hanne Blank is fascinated by food writer M.F.K. Fisher, who represented “style and self-assurance” and “sensual, unpretentious worldliness.” Blank continues: “Calm assertion is nine tenths of authority. Emotion is more potent without melodrama, or even exclamation points.” Justin Vivian Bond focuses on supermodel Karen Graham, the advertising face of Estée Lauder, to explore her own identity as “a small-town transperson…sure that what I wanted was to escape into a world of glamour and elegance, taste and refinement.” Other contributions include Rick Moody on singer Karen Dalton, musician Johanna Fateman on Andrea Dworkin, and novelist Kate Zambreno on Kathy Acker.
Blurring the line between biography and memoir, these essays consider the power of public personalities to illuminate one’s deepest sense of self.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-55861-866-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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