A beautifully wrenching memoir as piercing as smelling salts.
The story of a woman with a hole in her brain the size of a lemon.
We meet Cohen when she is 26 years old. For many of those years, she has suffered from disorientation, exhaustion, and not knowing left from right, which in turn have given her a shattering combination of insecurity, fear, shame, anxiety and panic. “I can’t judge distance, time, or space, read maps, travel independently without getting lost; or drive…you would never realize that as I’m walking next to you down the street, you are leading us both,” she writes. The author is verbally dexterous, however, and her memoir is rich with yearning and ache, conveying a scrunched sense of claustrophobia and imagery of cinematic quality. Throughout the book, Cohen ably conveys the gravity of her condition: “Being a fuck-up is an excuse as flimsy as it is sturdy. It’s a container for the cluttered detritus of all my smaller mistakes”; “I am thrown into the adult world like a match into gasoline. Burning down everything in my path is an organic reaction.” This is the story of her days from her first diagnosis—with digressions into her youth, when doctors were clueless about the causes of her condition—until today, in her early 30s. She follows her tracks through college and dialectical behavioral therapy, her tender and grueling first real romantic relationship, graduate school in writing, and the simple, everyday activities that spook her, such as walking out the door. This is not a short period of time, and the writing has a vital compression and severity, which is likely the result of a lifetime of an “anger, sadness, and pain...so epic as to only be properly graphed seismically.” The author also delivers flashes of humor to add levity to the proceedings.
A beautifully wrenching memoir as piercing as smelling salts.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62779-189-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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