An insightful, openhearted memoir about brutality in many forms.
Ristaino (Italian/Emory Univ.) shares a story of trauma and recovery in this debut remembrance.
On a September day in 2007, the author was entering a store from a parking lot with her two young children when their bulky, Cinderella-themed shopping cart got stuck on a curb. A man walked over, and Ristaino assumed that he meant to help her lift the cart. However, without warning, he instead launched into a violent attack against the shocked woman, injuring her jaw, shoulder, and eye. The assault changed the way that the author thought about stories that she’d heard from other women, who’d also been attacked: “Overnight, I was a member of a community,” she writes. “Stories tumbled into my pathway, one after another.” It wasn’t just other people’s experiences that engaged her, however: The assault and her attempts to write about it also awakened long-dormant memories of other events, including a molestation when she was 9 and a rape when she was in college. This book acts as a sort of trauma diary, documenting the aftermath of the 2007 attack as Ristaino attempted to deal with her new feelings of fear and weakness—as well as those of her children, who witnessed the assault. She also confronted a range of reactions of others—some racist (from white acquaintances who assumed that her attacker was black), some unsympathetic, and many simply tone-deaf—as well as alarming statistics regarding attacks on women. In addition, she began to seek closure on the earlier traumas in her life—particularly the molestation, which happened at the hands of someone close to her family whose identity she was too terrified to reveal. Ristaino writes in a clipped, controlled prose style that imparts a stark atmosphere to the work. When she tells of being concerned about leaving her kids alone with an adult acquaintance, she writes, “ ‘It has nothing to do with you. It’s my problem,’ I say. ‘I was molested as a child. So I never allow Ada to go to a house unless there are two adults there.’ He looks at me, confused, perhaps stunned.” The memoir is structured in short, incidental chapters, interspersed with brief memories that start at the attack and work backward. The chapters explore various areas of the author’s life; some are related closely to the assault (a memory of teaching her children what to do if someone tries to touch them), and others less directly linked (an analysis of the author’s relationship to her Italian heritage). She manages to weave in many relevant issues of the time period, as well, as when she tells of her extended-family members discussing Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s controversial 2009 arrest. The result is a swirling examination of many of the elements that can factor into violence in America, but it’s also a portrait of one woman’s experiences with such violence, and how she managed to find a way to avoid being destroyed by it.
An insightful, openhearted memoir about brutality in many forms.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-569-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2019
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 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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