A poignantly candid memoir about navigating the often rocky shores of family.
A former editor and literary agent tells the story of how her mother’s unexpected death forced her to come to terms with a tragic family past.
When Edelstein’s healthy 68-year-old mother suddenly drowned while snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef, her world upended. Not only did she have to confront the conflicting feelings she had long harbored toward her emotionally distant parent; she also had to process unresolved grief for a brother, Danny, who had committed an especially violent act of suicide 15 years earlier. The author’s mother had been a woman for whom order meant everything and whose love came with a “debilitating web of anxiety” that entangled those who were close to her. No one could speak the truth of what they were feeling; “everyone had to act like our world was perfectly okay.” It was her sweet, funny brother who helped Edelstein navigate the treacherous field around her mother. But as he grew older, his gentle manner gave way to meanness and irresponsibility, which she later recognized as symptoms of the illness that caused Danny to kill himself at age 22. Over time, the author learned that both her mother’s and brother’s behaviors came from an inherited tendency toward depression and bipolar disorder that had affected her mother’s father, who committed suicide at age 50 after multiple failed attempts; and her mother’s brother, who also committed midlife suicide. By revisiting her family’s past, Edelstein gradually began to understand that her mother’s maddening rigidity came from being “surrounded by suicide on all sides.” Determined not to let her emotional burdens drown her or destroy her marriage and family, she began the courageous task of breaking the silence around her family’s past to her own children. Touching and honest, Edelstein’s book offers keen analysis of the mother-daughter relationship while probing the perennial question of what makes humans choose life or death.
A poignantly candid memoir about navigating the often rocky shores of family.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59709-605-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
For the author’s fans.
A Fox News journalist and talk show host sets out to prove that she is not “an empty St. John suit in five-inch stiletto heels.”
The child of devout Christians, Minnesota native Carlson’s first love was music. She began playing violin at age 6 and quickly revealed that she was not only a prodigy, but also a little girl who thrived on pleasing audiences. Working with top teachers, she developed her art over the years. But by 16, Carlson began “chafing at [the] rigid, structured life” of a concert violinist–in-training and temporarily put music aside. At the urging of her mother, the high achiever set her sights on winning the Miss T.E.E.N. pageant, where she was first runner-up. College life at Stanford became yet another quest for perfection that led Carlson to admit it was “not attainable” after she earned a C in one class. At the end of her junior year and again at the urging of her mother, Carlson entered the 1989 Miss America pageant, which she would go on to win thanks to a brilliant violin performance. Dubbed the “smart Miss America,” Carlson struggled with pageant stereotypes as well as public perceptions of who she was. Being in the media spotlight every day during her reign, however, also helped her decide on a career in broadcast journalism. Yet success did not come easily. Sexual harassment dogged her, and many expressed skepticism about her abilities due to her pageant past. Even after she rose to national prominence, first as a CBS news broadcaster and then as a Fox talk show host, Carlson continued—and continues—to be labeled as “dumb or a bimbo.” Her history clearly demonstrates that she is neither. However, Carlson’s overly earnest tone, combined with her desire to show her Minnesota “niceness…in action,” as well as the existence of “abundant brain cells,” dampens the book’s impact.
For the author’s fans.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42745-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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