Rarely is a memoir so worth the terrible effort.
Irish-American O’Hagan, born and raised in Queens, takes her heart and squeezes until it purely aches as she relates how her son’s life came to a premature close.
It was a terrible family legacy: her mother’s unknown uncles, and then her mother’s brother all had Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and died young. DMD is hereditary, carried by females in one miserable gene that O’Hagan passes on to her younger son, Jamie. The author sings here of her father, a friend of the bottle who loved and battered and never shirked the hard acts of grace; of her mother, who sprinkled hope like fairy dust but also threw a Thanksgiving turkey at Dad when he arrived drunk for the festivities. But mostly she sings of the scalding innocence of Jamie. O’Hagan knew she was taking a chance when she got pregnant; she was a carrier and already had one healthy son. She tried denial when Jamie couldn’t negotiate the steps of the school bus, when he fell and fell and yelled for the other kids to wait up. Then she had to accept the horrible truth, and she searingly chronicles the essential “daily-ness” of DMD. She rejects the experts’ consoling advice that “successful adaptation does not depend on an accurate perception of reality”; she tells her son that “he [won’t] live to be old, that he shouldn’t worry about how long but instead, how deep.” Jamie partakes; O’Hagan slumps, overwhelmed by his effort and pain Her mother calls her on it: “Get up out of that goddam bed,” Mom snaps. “You’re falling down on the job.” Emotions come off the page like radioactive waves. When Jamie says, “I guess I’ll never have a girlfriend,” his mother can only reply, “I guess not.” Then, at age 24, Jamie dies in Long Island’s Stony Brook Hospital; she’s besieged by emptiness, grief, guilt, and a love that challenges her sanity, until she is able to focus on the husband and son she has left.
Rarely is a memoir so worth the terrible effort.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-32955-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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