An intimate study of three deaths and the role of hospices in easing transitions.
In this memoir grounded in New Age spirituality, a woman revisits the deaths of three pivotal figures, exploring the nature of loss and end-of-life care along the way.
In the introduction to her book, Victoria (It’s Not About You, Except When It Is, 2012, etc.) describes death as “sacred ground, the same sacred space of birth but facing a different direction.” From this singular perspective, she recounts her own deeply personal experiences with the deaths of her mother, father, and mother-in-law, all occurring within a 12-month period during the early 1990s, as well as her encounters with hospices, which provide pain-relief care and other support to terminal patients. The first of these transformative occurrences was the death of her mother-in-law, Mary, with whom she had an uncommonly close relationship. Following an affectionate portrait of Mary’s life, the narrative details her death after a devastating cancer diagnosis, accepted with “grace and resolve” to her last days, attended by her family and helpful hospice workers. The second part of the narrative shows another side of loss, as Victoria learns of her own mother’s death after the fact in a call from her brother, leading to a soul-searching examination of her parent’s life. The daughter of Polish Catholic immigrants who rebelliously married a non-Catholic, the author’s mother remained fiercely independent even after the end of her marriage. Victoria’s errant father is the subject of her final recollection. Absent for much of her life, he returns during his last years, and the author finds herself almost unwillingly having a “Dad” again as she tends him through his final journey. In these three stories, Victoria skillfully captures generations of a family, with all their disappointments and joys, woven together with an analysis of the role of death in life and vice versa. Sections of prose are interspersed with poems, which add depth to the biographies and bring a different, more emotional voice to the narrative. In the poem “Islands in the Snow,” she remembers her father: “After nineteen years, / thank you / for coming back / thank you for / eight snowy days in Maine / you and I and / Daisy Mae and Albert / (your Siamese sweethearts / now mine).” The book ends with a tender sketch of Victoria’s time as a hospice volunteer.
An intimate study of three deaths and the role of hospices in easing transitions.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-5956-8
Page Count: 202
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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