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
An intimate, stirring chronicle.
A daughter’s memories.
Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne’er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become “the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit” of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother’s demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titled The God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of “obscenity and corrupting public morality.” Arundhati sets her life in the context of India’s roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior.” Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter’s life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. “I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her.” Without her, “I didn’t make sense to myself anymore.” Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love.
An intimate, stirring chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668094716
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
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