This work movingly renders the complex emotional landscape of living in and out of the closet.
A gay woman recounts her experiences during the 1960s and onward in this debut memoir.
Anderson was raised in a working-class Detroit neighborhood by loving, practical, and devoutly Baptist parents. As a teenager, she was shocked to realize she felt an attraction to her worldlier friend Gina. The concept of gay rights didn’t exist in Anderson’s world, and she dreaded the label “lesbian.” Determined to be “normal,” she pursued relationships with men in college. Yet she developed another crush on a female friend, Nicky. Nicky reciprocated, and the two began a relationship that appeared platonic (at first) to outsiders, including Anderson’s boyfriend. A dorm room confrontation showed Anderson that her “friendship” was raising eyebrows, and the two drifted apart. As sexual liberation swept the nation, Anderson befriended other gay women and enjoyed tentative self-acceptance. Yet she continued to hide her true identity from her parents. She eventually met Linda, a woman in an open marriage, and what started as a fling became something more. After Linda left her husband, Anderson wrestled with a new role: parental figure to her lover’s daughters. Anderson regretted never coming out to her father before his sudden death. Determined to not repeat her mistake, she wrestled with how to tell her mother about Linda. As the years progressed, Anderson’s romantic, family, and professional lives continued to shift as American attitudes about homosexuality changed and homophobia lessened but didn’t disappear. The author writes compellingly about the burden of the closet—not only the threat of physical violence and social censure, but the constant emotional labor required to hide her full identity, first just from herself, then from loved ones and the outside world. She writes stirringly, too, about the genuine love between her and her parents and about the ecstasy and terror accompanying sexual awakening (“I seemed to be going through a kind of gay adolescence, discovering myself attractive on multiple levels to the women around me.…So hungry for physical connection after years of stuffing away my emotional and sexual feelings for women, it was like unleashing a spring-loaded can of confetti”). She skillfully executes emotionally weighty scenes, such as coming out to her mother, though some readers might crave a few more full episodes capturing the rhythms of daily life to balance out the psychological introspection.
This work movingly renders the complex emotional landscape of living in and out of the closet.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-314-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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