A cathartic, blisteringly candid family portrait of abuse, dysfunction, and eventual epiphany.
A Frenchwoman reflects on the familial abuse she witnessed and suppressed for years.
Kouchner’s moving, elegantly written memoir begins in 2017 with the unexpected death of her mother, Évelyne, with whom she’d been estranged. Though none of Évelyne’s five children were by her side when she died, they were reunited at the hospital, looking like a “slightly decrepit but reformed rock group.” The author chronicles her affluent upbringing, providing intriguing details about her father, Bernard, a diplomat, and free-spirited Évelyne, a feminist intellectual and political scientist who, in the 1960s, had a romance with Fidel Castro. Kouchner, a lecturer at the University of Paris, describes the bourgeoisie milieu of her large extended family, which also encompassed political dignitaries, and their carefree attitudes toward nudity, libertarianism, and a variety of social and cultural issues. The author is distinctly cleareyed when chronicling her family’s mental deterioration after the suicides of her grandparents. She is equally lucid in her depiction of her mother’s remarriage to her (unnamed) stepfather, a high-profile French intellectual and “combination of Michel Berger and Eddy Mitchell.” At their family home, he emerged as a rambunctious yet beloved and kind “constitutionalist.” However, his relationships to his stepchildren carried murkier undertones. In graphic chapters, Kouchner details the sexual abuse her twin brother endured at age 14, and she writes poignantly about how the suppressed guilt, “begat by lies” and shame she felt, bled into her adulthood and became “a new twinhood.” The secrecy clouded new relationships, while her brother, who went on to have “a truly brilliant career,” still suffered. “Over the slow process of rebuilding themselves, victims continue to believe they’re guilty for a long time,” writes Kouchner, “a classic process that I instinctively grasped and understood.” When she and her brother publicly broke their silence, the ensuing explosive ordeal scandalized French society enough to inspire new legislation on incest and rape.
A cathartic, blisteringly candid family portrait of abuse, dysfunction, and eventual epiphany.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63542-212-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
