An unsentimentally candid memoir of hope and determination.
A Canadian-born actress’s account of how she survived—and then left—an impoverished and dysfunctional family.
When Williams was 24 years old, she decided to leave her hard-luck family to follow her dream of becoming an actress. But on the day of her departure, she discovered that her brother Randy had killed himself with a shotgun. In a narrative that moves between the events surrounding the aftermath of that death and her past, Williams tells the story of her troubled family. Her mother, Simone, was a trade school dropout who exchanged “a future vocation for immediate affection” with Jack, a hard-living, hard-drinking man who worked primarily as a logger and occasional day laborer. Throughout the author’s childhood and adolescence, the couple moved more than 25 times and had more children than they could afford. Over time, Jack took to living part-time with the family, causing even more instability. Poverty and injustice dogged them at every step as the relationship between Williams’ parents deteriorated and a desperate—and desperately unhappy—Simone tried to commit suicide. The one person in the family who seemed most affected by their problems was her sensitive, musically gifted brother Randy, who began hearing voices and cutting himself in his late teens. Though Williams herself showed musical promise as a singer, she dropped out of high school believing that “the [only] way to get ahead was to get to work.” However, her involvement in community theater brought her an opportunity to study drama at a theater school. Part of what makes this book so compelling is the tragic mirroring Williams depicts between herself and her brother, both of whom found liberation from their family but in radically different ways. Searingly honest, the book is a testimony to one woman’s resilience and ability to love in the face of unimaginable hardship.
An unsentimentally candid memoir of hope and determination.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60980-672-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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