A 20-something American hoping for inner peace is burdened by paranoia and distrust in the second installment of this memoir.
Balor’s (Outbursts of a Privileged White Man, 2018) debut was a year’s worth of journal entries. His latest follows the same structure, beginning in mid-November 2017 when he lived with his father. It was a tense situation, as the author could hear the upstairs tenants speaking derogatorily about his often drunk father. So he left his father’s home and his grocery store job to live at a community known as “the Peaceorama.” Though it was initially a calm endeavor, Balor soon believed others at the Peaceorama resented him. He also had believed for some time that he was a paranoid schizophrenic and often “heard” other people’s thoughts, which generally condemned him. He ultimately moved back in with his father and worked at a series of jobs. His outlandish behavior was sometimes deliberate, such as mowing his father’s lawn in khakis, an “old man mask,” and a gaiter on his head. He, however, feared that his “acting” as a psychopath was a cover for a genuine psychosis. By the end of this installment of his story, Balor has isolated himself in an attic apartment, worried he might be the monster that some people perceived. Like the author’s preceding book, this lengthy memoir often takes a stream-of-consciousness approach. There are also quotes, poetry, and fragments of stories that occasionally interrupt Balor’s narrative. Nevertheless, there’s a discernible focus on Balor’s search for some form of normality. For example, he tried to find a steady job and made efforts to befriend people, even those who clearly didn’t like him. Though it’s a primarily somber peek into the author’s life, the book offers morsels of humor. In one of them Balor speaks to a woman at an unemployment agency as if she were an artificial intelligence, and his random thoughts are sometimes darkly comical: “Soup is an excellent method to poison someone.”
An unconventional personal account that’s gloomy but fascinating.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-8708-0
Page Count: 482
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
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More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP
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PROFILES
The debut memoir from the pop and fashion star.
Early on, Simpson describes the book she didn’t write: “a motivational manual telling you how to live your best life.” Though having committed to the lucrative deal years before, she “walked away,” fearing any sort of self-help advice she might give would be hypocritical. Outwardly, Simpson was at the peak of her success, with her fashion line generating “one billion dollars in annual sales.” However, anxiety was getting the better of her, and she admits she’d become a “feelings addict,” just needing “enough noise to distract me from the pain I’d been avoiding since childhood. The demons of traumatic abuse that refused to let me sleep at night—Tylenol PM at age twelve, red wine and Ambien as a grown, scared woman. Those same demons who perched on my shoulder, and when they saw a man as dark as them, leaned in to my ear to whisper, ‘Just give him your light. See if it saves him…’ ” On Halloween 2017, Simpson hit rock bottom, and, with the intervention of her devoted friends and husband, began to address her addictions and underlying fears. In this readable but overlong narrative, the author traces her childhood as a Baptist preacher’s daughter moving 18 times before she “hit fifth grade,” and follows her remarkable rise to fame as a singer. She reveals the psychological trauma resulting from years of sexual abuse by a family friend, experiences that drew her repeatedly into bad relationships with men, most publicly with ex-husband Nick Lachey. Admitting that she was attracted to the validating power of an audience, Simpson analyzes how her failings and triumphs have enabled her to take control of her life, even as she was hounded by the press and various music and movie executives about her weight. Simpson’s memoir contains plenty of personal and professional moments for fans to savor.
An eye-opening glimpse into the attempted self-unmaking of one of Hollywood’s most recognizable talents.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-289996-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
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