Courageous, heartbreaking, infuriating, and ultimately victorious; a significant contribution to the cycle-of-abuse...
A debut memoir details generations of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse that ultimately tears a dysfunctional family apart.
Stein’s grandfather was a nasty alcoholic who raped at least one of his own daughters. Gigi, the author’s mother, was 13 years old when her own mom walked out on the family, leaving her five daughters to fend for themselves against their abusive father. Gigi quickly took up with an older man, Marco Rossi, becoming pregnant at 15. It was a devastating blow to her when her little boy died from a heart defect at 3. She and Marco went on to have three more children before they finally broke up. Next came Henry McCardle. Henry bought a house for Gigi and her young children and added two kids of his own to the household. He and Gigi had three more. Both Marco and Henry were womanizers and heavy drinkers. Marco was a violent drunk and Henry was a sexual predator. While Henry was away on “business trips,” Gigi hit the local bars. It was within this amalgam of siblings, half siblings, and absentee parents that Stein was raised. By the age of 7, the author writes, “I already knew that I had two mothers—a good, comforting one whom I loved, and a mean, foul-mouthed drunk who could withdraw that love without warning.” The eye-opening narrative by Stein (writing under a pseudonym) is riveting. Describing the family code of secrecy and denial, she asserts: “Our family was one in which silences about deeply troubling matters were normal, and indeed required.” Some of the darker family secrets are kept closeted for a major portion of the jaw-dropping memoir. One of these concerns Henry and Gigi’s children and is likely to cause readers confusion. It is a disconcerting absence of information, but it gives readers a sense of the turmoil the author experienced for many decades.
Courageous, heartbreaking, infuriating, and ultimately victorious; a significant contribution to the cycle-of-abuse literature.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64293-118-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bombardier Books
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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