A poignant and wholly original memoir of liberation through confinement.
Going into her shell.
As Chen struggles in the aftermath of her divorce, her mother, wishing her daughter to calm down, repeatedly texts the author this misspelled advice: “clam down.” This leads Chen to write of herself as having morphed into a clam: “She hadn’t meant to become a bivalve mollusk, but it happened.” The result is a dreamlike, albeit carefully studied, tale exploring introversion, hardening one’s exterior as a means of self-protection and reliance. “Since her transformation,” she writes, “she was more convinced she could hold it together.” Chen, the author of the experimental novel So Many Olympic Exertions, mines reclusion with a full commitment to metaphor, opting for descriptions that provide distance from the rawness and expression of her emotions. The layering transforms this unusual memoir into a palimpsest. Chen’s tone avoids anthropomorphizing her nameless female subject, referred to only as “the clam,” but her notes on parallels between mollusks and people glimmer as the author’s vulnerable revelations: “Clams, like humans, needed to open their mouths to live.” Chen’s life continues—she travels, reads, teaches, spends time in social situations and dates—even as she denies her personhood: “Her shell held her together…she lived inside it, it contained her—she couldn’t see beyond it….Then she would be able to look back, one day, to see what she was creating.” In the book’s second half, the author intersperses chapters narrated in the first-person perspective of her father, who shares many of Chen’s hermetic traits. (“I don’t like talk to anybody.”) The clam, meanwhile, makes supernumerary references to Darwin’s evolutionary theories as well as myriad historical and modern representations of mollusks. Her meditations lead her to examine “her family’s Asian clam tendencies” and to question, then accept, her father’s preference for solitude. The book drags a bit, yet it pays off as Chen, ultimately, steps into her own voice with a greater understanding of healing.
A poignant and wholly original memoir of liberation through confinement.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781984801845
Page Count: 368
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A charming and often poignant valediction from rock ’n’ roll’s Prince of Darkness.
The late heavy metal legend considers his mortality in this posthumous memoir.
“I ain’t ready to go anywhere,” writes Osbourne in the opening pages of his new memoir. “It’s good being alive. I like it. I want to be here with my family.” Given the context—Osbourne died on July 22, 2025, two weeks after the publisher announced the news of this book—it’s undeniably sad. But the rest of the text sees the Black Sabbath singer confronting the health struggles of his last years with dark humor and something approaching grace. The memoir begins in 2018; he wrote an earlier one, I Am Ozzy, in 2010. He tells of a staph infection he suffered that proved to be the start of a long, painful battle with various illnesses—soon after, he contracted a flu, which morphed into pneumonia. A spinal injury caused by a fall followed, causing him to undergo a series of surgeries and leaving him struggling with intense pain. And then there was his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, the treatment of which was complicated by his longtime struggle with alcohol and drug addiction. Osbourne peppers the chronicle of his final years with anecdotes from his past, growing up in Birmingham, England, and playing with—and then being fired from—Black Sabbath, and some of his most well-known antics (yes, he does address biting the heads off of a dove and a bat). He writes candidly and regretfully about the time he viciously attacked his wife, Sharon—the book is in many ways a love letter to her and his children. The memoir showcases Osbourne’s wit and charm; it’s rambling and disorganized, but so was he. It functions as both a farewell and a confession, and fans will likely find much to admire in this account. “Death’s been knocking at my door for the last six years, louder and louder,” he writes. “And at some point, I’m gonna have to let him in.”
A charming and often poignant valediction from rock ’n’ roll’s Prince of Darkness.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781538775417
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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