A memoir from the shadows that’s just as fascinating as those that inhabit the spotlight.
A ghostwriter pens her own revealing story.
Cagan (Peace Is Possible, 2007, etc.) has worked as a professional writer for more than 20 years. On the surface, she’s lived an enviable, adventurous life, hobnobbing with the rich and famous and traveling the world. Yet her memoir is an honest, balanced reflection that follows the circuitous path she took to achieving peace and, perhaps, contentment. Cagan was a dancer for years before taking a foray into acting and eventually ending up as a writer. The self-confidence and discipline that Cagan learned in ballet helped her in many of her subsequent challenges and prepared her for the unconventional life she would ultimately lead. Later, as a ghostwriter, she learned the art of ordering the chaos of another person’s life and truly dissolving her own self to become “the other.” The memoir then reflects on her work as a writer in addition to other aspects of her past, such as failed marriages, her relationship with her mother, and the death of a loved one. She explores broad topics, such as religion and aging, offering numerous anecdotes and relating hard lessons she’s learned. It’s an intriguing and potentially frightening undertaking to move from composing others’ stories to exposing one’s own inner workings. As Cagan does so, she’s often candid, humorous, reflective, and remorseful; she doesn’t shy away from divulging the darker aspects of her life, including frequent drug use and abusive relationships. Her memoir takes a nonlinear, thematically organized approach. This strategy pays off as the chapters pull from different eras of her life, connected by thematic threads. In “Intrepid,” for example, the topics range from her father’s fearlessness to her own courage years later volunteering at an AIDS hospice. In the closing pages, Cagan wonders whether she’s “done enough” to pen an interesting memoir. Simply put: she has.
A memoir from the shadows that’s just as fascinating as those that inhabit the spotlight.Pub Date: June 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5053-1962-0
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
