Unflinchingly candid and occasionally heartbreaking.
An award-winning journalist tells the story of how her formerly charmed life in which “lost things could always be replaced” came to a brutally abrupt end.
In the late 1990s, Levy (Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, 2005) was a young assistant at New York magazine trying to make it as a writer. “Greedy…like a hungry cat” for success, she aggressively sought out the connections that led to more high-profile assignments and eventually, in 2008, a coveted position as a staff writer at the New Yorker. By this time, she was living the promise of second-wave feminism that women “could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us.” Not only did she have a thriving writing career that took her around the world and made her the toast of New York literary circles. She had also defied convention: at a time when gay marriage was not yet legal, she married a woman. Lucy was the love of her life and the person to whom she had sworn her first, but not only, allegiance. As though to prove her sexual freedom, Levy then had an affair with a trans man and confessed it to Lucy, who began drinking heavily. “I lived in a state of bewilderment punctuated by fury and aching guilt,” she writes. As their broken relationship began to mend, a male friend looking to become a parent “but…at a distance” agreed to donate his sperm to Levy, who successfully became pregnant. Yet the shadow of Lucy’s alcoholism hung over her life. While on assignment in Mongolia, the author lost her baby, and her marriage to Lucy imploded not long afterward. The honesty with which Levy confronts her youthful hubris and its consequences makes powerfully compelling reading. With dignity and grace, this former golden girl eloquently acknowledges how the fact that “everybody doesn’t get everything” in life is “as natural and unavoidable as mortality.”
Unflinchingly candid and occasionally heartbreaking.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9693-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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