An elegant, frank, and tender memoir.
A journal of grief and healing following a beloved husband's death.
Ascher, a memoirist and travel writer, met her older psychiatrist husband, Bob, when she was a college student. After 35 years of enviable closeness, in 2002, a cancer diagnosis ended his life at 77. Like Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates in A Widow's Story, Ascher revisits the practical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of Bob’s death, her loss, and the bewildering period that followed. Her often lovely writing freshens familiar observations: "Morning is among grief's cruelties because sleep swallows reality and then releases you to the news. You have to do this again and again before it’s no longer a surprise.” A list of sailing terms she learned in her many years as her husband's first mate, "once vital,” were now "relegated to the language of longing. A torch song." The author also writes about how her relationships with her adult children and their spouses—her daughter and Bob's children by a previous marriage—were consolidated during Bob's illness, offering strength and comfort. But after he was gone, she and her daughter became "a splintered girl group." Like many other bereaved people, Ascher often feels that Bob is present and sending her messages, usually via various avian appearances. She interprets these less as magical thinking than "cosmic winks.” Though her editor reminded her she was "not woo-woo,” she replied that she was “getting more so every day.” Many times, the author has thought about a comment made by a neighbor who had also lost a husband: "You'll think you're sane, but you're not." Though she had various gentlemen callers during the early days of her widowhood, it was more than 10 years later when she was called again to love's table. Did Bob show up in the form of a bird to express his opinion? You'll have to read the book.
An elegant, frank, and tender memoir.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9600977-6-0
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.
A writer’s journey to find himself.
In January 2015, French novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and memoirist Carrère began a 10-day meditation retreat in the Morvan forest of central France. For 10 hours per day, he practiced Vipassana, “the commando training of meditation,” hoping for both self-awareness and material for a book. “I’m under cover,” he confesses, planning to rely on memory rather than break the center’s rule forbidding note taking. Long a practitioner of tai chi, the author saw yoga, too, as a means of “curtailing your ego, your greed, your thirst for competition and conquest, about educating your conscience to allow it unfiltered access to reality, to things as they are.” Harsh reality, however, ended his stay after four days: A friend had been killed in a brutal attack at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and he was asked to speak at his funeral. Carrère’s vivid memoir, translated by Lambert—and, Carrère admits, partly fictionalized—covers four tumultuous years, weaving “seemingly disparate” experiences into an intimate chronicle punctuated by loss, desperation, and trauma. Besides reflecting on yoga, he reveals the recurring depression and “erratic, disconnected, unrelenting” thoughts that led to an unexpected diagnosis; his four-month hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, during which he received electroshock therapy; his motivation for, and process of, writing; a stay on the Greek island of Leros, where he taught writing to teenage refugees, whose fraught journeys and quiet dreams he portrays with warmth and compassion; his recollection of a tsunami in Sri Lanka, which he wrote about in Lives Other Than My Own; an intense love affair; and, at last, a revival of happiness. Carrère had planned to call his yoga book Exhaling, which could serve for this memoir as well: There is a sense of relief and release in his effort to make sense of his evolving self.
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60494-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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