A funny, candid, and authentic memoir.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist chronicles her childhood and formative years in rural central Florida.
When she was young, Hull often accompanied her father through the orange groves he tended as a fruit buyer for the juice processor HP Hood. Her schoolteacher mother had designated her the “ride-along minder” meant to “steer [her father] clear of the red neon Schlitz signs that called to him on his drive home.” Before Hull’s parents had settled in the town that, every spring, smelled “like God had knocked over a bottle of Ladies of Gardenia,” both had dreamed of becoming writers. That dream ended when Hull’s mother, unwilling to nurse her husband’s “illness” any longer, took her children back and forth between Sebring and St. Petersburg as she struggled to make a life on her own. The family finally settled in “St. Pete,” a city of “old people.” Living in her eccentric grandmother’s house among “Tibetan singing bowls [and] Guatemalan handicrafts” made Hull feel more at ease. Her mother eventually remarried, this time to a man she didn’t love and who didn’t appreciate “kids who talked back.” The newly sober father with whom she began reconciling paid for Hull’s “escape” to Florida State, where she embraced her nascent lesbianism and became a Revlon shampoo sales representative. “Being aimless and average at nineteen was excusable; at twenty-two, I was ready to grab any piece of driftwood floating by that might keep me from going under,” she writes. Then a small newsroom job with the St. Petersburg Times kick-started the writing career neither of her parents chose to pursue—she went on to work for more than two decades at the Washington Post—and it began the unlikely journey that took Hull away from her multigenerational roots. This warmly evocative recollection of her formative years will appeal to a wide audience, especially those who enjoy understated, stylishly well-told stories.
A funny, candid, and authentic memoir.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9780805093377
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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