A stark, honest book that reads like a writer’s apprenticeship amid harrowing circumstances.
A tragic accident gives birth to a writer.
Before the car crash that almost killed him, Narrative Magazine assistant editor Byars was a college student from a Southern family that included his identical twin brother, Will. This memoir of recovery against considerable odds traces the relationship between the brothers, their innate closeness, and what changed after the accident and what didn’t, but Will doesn’t figure nearly as prominently throughout as the title would seem to suggest. In much of the first half, the author seems to be trying to figure out just what is his story and how best to tell it. The crash in which he was a passenger threatened to kill him and initially seemed likely to paralyze him, and then he suffered post-surgical complications so severe that the doctors predicted he wouldn’t survive for more than one week. Byars beat the odds in terms of both survival and physical mobility, but he still faced a long road to what would never be all the way back. He had to relearn how to talk and to figure out how to get around on his own. And he was on his own a lot, partly by choice (“I only knew what I didn’t want to do: anything to do with stagnation. My parents seemed content with my doing nothing”) but also partly because others his age, particularly potential romantic partners, didn’t quite know how to deal with someone whose body had suffered so much. “My brain felt like the least damaged part of my body,” he writes. “It was painfully undamaged.” Despite occasional wishes that he had somehow forgotten who he had been or the extent of his predicament, his memoir is remarkably free of sentimentality or self-pity. He found both an outlet and a vocation in his writing, and he had to come to terms with the loss of those who had been prepared to lose him.
A stark, honest book that reads like a writer’s apprenticeship amid harrowing circumstances.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-29028-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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