An intensely honest and engrossing account of a young man’s struggles to calm his demons.
A writer with bipolar disorder portrays the highs and lows of his psychotic episodes in this memoir.
Raised in an upper-middle-class, loving home with two siblings, the young Stevens firmly believed life was good. Although shorter than most of his peers in high school, through relentless training and a fierce competitive spirit, he excelled at basketball. He was elected team captain in his senior year. But severe hallucinations began in his freshman year at college. Clouds in the sky talked to him and turned into a lion, a bunny, and then a king wearing a crown. “I am a king,” he thought. This led to his first confinement in a psychiatric hospital. There would be two more psychotic episodes resulting in hospitalization, until he learned to identify and cope with the triggers for his mania. The author’s forthright prose graphically illustrates his varying states of mind: “I looked up and saw a gorilla with my face on the ceiling fighting a wolf….The wolf ripped my head off and chewed on it. I swallowed with fear.” At the beginning of his candid and absorbing memoir, Stevens delivers a vivid description of a manic escapade, capturing the ferocity of his flights from reality and the strange aftermaths. He was in “a packed pizza shop” and yelled, “Shut the fuck up! I’ve had enough of you all talking behind my back!” When a guy tried to help, the author pushed him back over a table. About 30 men were ready to eject him so he charged “toward the door” and “was met by punches.” But once out on the street, he writes, “I stood up like nothing had happened and went about my day.” Despite his illness, the author displays great self-confidence while discussing his accomplishments during his nonmanic periods, when he could harness his energy and singular focus into productive endeavors. He was a firebrand door-to-door salesman for an office products company, earned “$100,000” playing poker, and became general manager of a fitness club chain and vice president of his brother’s software company—all before the age of 29. This illuminating book should especially appeal to readers coping with bipolar disorder and their families and friends.
An intensely honest and engrossing account of a young man’s struggles to calm his demons.Pub Date: April 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64544-049-9
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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