An overly sentimental book. Child-free readers—and levelheaded parents in need of a break—should take a pass.
A mother's angst-filled yet romanticized experience of her children's growth.
Near the beginning of her latest book, Real Simple “Modern Manners” columnist and parenting blogger Newman (Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, 2005) notes how there are "things you thought would be fun with kids but secretly aren’t”—e.g., “making biscuits, watching the Peter Sellers Pink Panther movies, ice-skating”—and “how they all end up in tears and pooping." Unfortunately, the author frequently overwhelms readers with cooing worship of her young children, and her focus on and adoration of them seem to exist in a bubble in which the nuclear family rarely comes into contact with outsiders. (She has no inclination for mentioning her husband, who barely registers in the narrative.) Newman is clearly besotted with her daughter, but readers may become frustrated with such observations as, "her dark-lashed peach of a face the dearest thing I've ever had the good sense to notice.” The author’s voice is deliberate and soft, and the very short chapters catalog her insecurities and show that she makes little time for herself. Most scenes are interior, centered on meals and the children’s precocious conversations. Yet Newman is self-aware, and she admits she is filled with "dotty, nearly heartbroken devotion and, also, something like despair.” But there is no relatable or humorous counterweight to her "apocalyptic, death-and-mayhem catalog of possibilities that arrive[s] daily in the in-box of [her] brain.” Even as her children move into their preteen years, she continues to romantically pine for their early-childhood wonder. "I drive everybody crazy with my nostalgia and happiness,” she writes. “I am bittersweet personified."
An overly sentimental book. Child-free readers—and levelheaded parents in need of a break—should take a pass.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-33750-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2016
As is to be expected from Lessing (The Real Thing; 1992, etc.), whose clear and always intelligent no-nonsense writing has explored subjects that transcend the commonplace, this first volume of her autobiography reflects all her remarkable strengths. The year of her birth, 1919, was auspicious neither for her parents in particular nor for the world in general. The ill-matched Taylers had married not out of love but out of a mutual need to expunge the horror of the recently ended world war, which had maimed Lessing's father both physically and mentally — he'd lost a leg in battle, but more important, be was embittered by what he considered Britain's poor treatment of her soldiers. Her mother, an able nurse, had lost a fiancÉ, and marriage now seemed to offer only the consolation of children. These disappointments, exacerbated by the harsh life in rural Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where her family settled after a stint in Persia, would indelibly shape Lessing. She quarreled frequently with her mother, whose well-meaning strictures she resented; observed her father's despair and his failures as a settler-farmer; and resolved that she would not live like them — "I will not, I will not!" — even if it meant defying convention. Which she did, as she left her first husband and their two children for another man — Gottried Lessing; joined the local Communist Party in the midst of WW II "because of the spirit of the times, because of the Zeitgeist"; and then moved in 1949 permanently to London. Like so many bright and alienated provincials, Lessing found an escape in voracious reading. Though determined to be a writer, the consuming distractions of motherhood, wartime society, and political activities frustrated this ambition for a long time. Refreshingly, not a self-indulgent mea culpa, but a brutally frank examination of how Lessing became what she is — a distinguished writer, a woman who has lived life to the full, and a constant critic of cant.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017150-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In a dramatic memoir, Sexton (Private Acts, 1991, etc.) offers her account of life with suicidal poet Anne Sexton. This highly personal account complements Diane Middlebrook's 1991 biography of Anne Sexton, and even textual overlaps can be intriguing. For example, Middlebrook places one of Anne's suicide attempts near Linda's Harvard dormitory room but across from the office of Barbara Schwartz, then Anne's therapist. Here Linda simply omits Schwartz from the scene, thus highlighting her own importance to the story. One of Linda's primary themes is in fact her attempt to extricate herself from her mother's dependence on her. The childhood scenes Linda paints (including seeing her mother masturbate) most often terrify her and her younger sister, Joy. Anne's depression and instability make a poor match for her husband's volatility: She taunts him, and he beats her as the children look on. Writing with the immediacy of the present tense, Linda notes than when Anne spanks her, ``she never counts. She just does it till she isn't angry anymore.... I hate her. I hate me.'' Linda responds to such chaos by imposing order in her own small ways, eating precisely one piece of Halloween candy each day or tidying the house her mother ignores while she writes. Linda even tries to take care of her mother, but it is not until she reaches high school that they become friends: ``At last she seemed to like me.'' As Linda matures, she learns about writing, particularly from Anne and her friend Maxine Kumin, but she also struggles to free herself of her mother. Even after Anne's suicide, Linda finds her life linked to her mother's, most directly in her work as literary executor, but most disturbingly in her own struggle against depression and her battles to maintain her equilibrium when dealing with her own children. In deceptively fluid prose, Linda explores her complex relationship to her mother and strips raw the nerves of a troubled family. (Photo insert, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-78207-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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