Ghosts, skulls, and skeletons haunt a woman’s elusive memories.
A peripatetic childhood is marked by resentment and loneliness.
Because her father worked for a petroleum company, Wallen (Moon Pies and Movie Stars, 2006) moved with her family from Nevada to Nigeria, Peru, and Bolivia, each time suffering “giant, seismic shifts in cultures” that led to a fear of emotional attachments and inevitable loss. In her first nonfiction book, the author creates a candid but uneven rendering of her childhood experiences, probing family stories in an effort to discover reality. One experience, which mystifies Wallen, occurred in Peru, where she remembers that her family looted an ancient gravesite for artifacts, with which they decorated their home. Asking her parents, now in their 80s, for verification, her mother admits that they had been grave robbers but insists that she “had no idea” that what they were doing was illegal, if not immoral. “We were ghouls,” Wallen’s mother realizes now. “Hideous people.” But apart from that event, the family hardly seems ghoulish or hideous, although they were sometimes clueless about young Amy’s needs. Unfortunately, family members and friends come across as one-dimensional figures or, worse, stereotypes—e.g., the buxom, warmhearted African nanny, the diffident house steward. Wallen’s two older siblings, sent to boarding school in Switzerland, and her father, usually out in the field, are lightly sketched. Her mother, “nervous and harried,” emerges as brittle, impatient, and highly demanding. Wallen’s longing for her love is a recurring theme. “I had a talent for disappointing her,” she writes. The author sees unearthing a dead body as analogous to the perilous project of digging up shards of the past. “Every time you remember,” she writes, “you rewrite” and reimagine. “The more often you tell the memory, the more it becomes about you, and the less it becomes about what actually happened.” But her self-portrait undermines her project of discovering family history: as she tries to capture her childish perspective, she too often comes across as whiny rather than emotionally vulnerable.
Ghosts, skulls, and skeletons haunt a woman’s elusive memories.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9695-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Atlanticsenior 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
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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