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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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