A minor addition to the literature of dysfunctional families and the damage that parents can do to their children's psyches,...
A lugubrious memoir by a woman who, through psychoanalysis, came to understand how her self-image had been shaped by childhood yearnings for a normal family life—complete with a strong, protective father and a stable, caring mother.
Hughes was only two when her father, a bootlegger, was slain by the Cleveland Mafia. Her mercurial, often hysterical, and frequently bewildered mother (a decidedly unmaternal woman so neglected by her own mother that she was raised in an orphanage) told her that her father had died of pneumonia. While fantasizing that her father was up in heaven keeping an eye on her, Hughes learned to become her own parent, looking after her mother as she longed for her mother to look after her. At 12, her older brother told her the truth about her father's violent death, and newspapers at the public library filled in the sordid details. Anxious to get away from her mother, she got married while still in her teens—to a young man who seemed to offer an escape. Interspersed with chapters about her miserable childhood and her marriage to a domineering husband are her account of sessions with her psychoanalyst: "I ride the analyst's couch and see the murders and my unparented childhood from the safety of that room. . . . I weep for the first time at all my losses." In the long process of analysis, Hughes is able to replace her imaginary father with a realistic assessment of a flawed human being, to forgive her mother for her blighted childhood, to understand what was keeping her in her unhappy marriage, and finally to start a new life.
A minor addition to the literature of dysfunctional families and the damage that parents can do to their children's psyches, this woe-is-me tale with an upbeat ending has little to recommend it.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57962-072-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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
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