A succinct portrait of the nature of submission and one woman discovering herself in marriage and beyond.
In this candid, objective memoir of a codependent marriage, the author takes readers on a painful yet poignant journey from a failing marriage toward independence.
Moore demonstrates finesse in choosing anecdotes that portray the dysfunction of a poorly communicated union of desires and life paths. Married to Carl, Moore found herself embarking on sexual escapades with other couples in order to meet her restless husband’s insatiable desires. But, discomforted by Carl’s mounting need to control, experience and dominate Moore’s reluctant involvement with other male partners, the author began to resist her husband, only to be met with ridicule. Instances of his disgust and resentment painfully resonate, such as his insistence that Moore’s nightgown is a “bag” and telling her that she doesn’t dress sexily enough, enjoy enough alcohol or provide him with the satisfaction he seeks. In her frank memoir, Moore confronts her own rigid expectations of fidelity and marital intimacy, citing an instance of outrage upon discovering that Carl was viewing pornographic pictures on the couple’s computer. In a sense, however, the objective storytelling reveals that each partner presented obstacles to the other’s happiness. One partner sought monogamy, stability, religion and purity; the other sought openness, excitement and growing connections with other adults. Some readers might even relate to Carl. While neither partner comes across as guilty of gross abuse, both are portrayed as unable or unwilling to actively listen and understand the other’s desires. Moore paints a clear portrait of the way submission is driven by the desire for control. At a poignant moment in the memoir, Moore even admits that she suddenly recognized her own attempts to control Carl, having believed all along that he was the controlling partner. In retrospect, submission becomes a kind of conscious power play, and the unwillingness to express desire becomes just as detrimental to a relationship as the harshly honest admission of dissatisfaction. In a welcome conclusion, the memoir ends with an insightful, hopeful resolution that will speak to any reader who has endured a conflict-ridden relationship. Perhaps the author puts it best in quoting an unnamed priest: “Go where you are nourished.”
A succinct portrait of the nature of submission and one woman discovering herself in marriage and beyond.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1452560199
Page Count: 86
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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