An engaging account of an angry, sad, and ultimately triumphant journey to new beginnings.
In this debut memoir, a woman revisits the tumultuous period during and after the dissolution of her 20-year marriage, recalling her struggles to reimagine and reconstruct her life.
In 2009, six years and seven judges after Willett discovered that her husband, Jake, was cheating on her, a divorce decree was issued. She was “fifty-three and unemployed.” She had not wanted the divorce and did everything she could to fight it. Finally, the author did win one battle: She got to keep the couple’s house, a beautiful Victorian brownstone in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. The legal skirmishes surrounding the divorce offer an illuminating backstory that highlights the changing ethos in the family court system of the new millennium. Some readers may see it as a reflection of the “mommy wars” prevalent in today’s social media universe. Willett had given up her own legal career after her first daughter, Nicki, was born. By 2009, she had not held a full-time job for over a decade. For this decision, she received a disturbing, highly unprofessional dressing down by the seventh judge, a woman: “You’ve offended every working parent in the courthouse by becoming a stay-at-home mom.” Four years later, as the couple’s younger daughter, Ella, a high school senior, was preparing to go off to college, the author accepted the reality that it was time to sell the brownstone. Although she had already spent years returning or discarding the things Jake had left behind, she now was faced with dispensing with the plethora of items that can accumulate over more than a decade of living in a large house. The agonizing process of going through every cabinet, stored carton, and piece of paper forms the organizational structure of the intriguing narrative. Each item triggers a series of vivid memories, creating a story that frequently, sometimes exhaustingly alternates back and forth in time. While there are too many details, the articulate prose is solid (“Clutter experts say if you haven’t used something in a year you should err on the side of throwing it out. I could have filled truckloads using that litmus test, but it seemed wasteful. Besides, what if I plain loved something, even if I barely or never used it?”). Readers who have endured “paring down” will find much here that resonates.
An engaging account of an angry, sad, and ultimately triumphant journey to new beginnings.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64293-150-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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