A forceful and wide-ranging advice book for readers raising young women.
A parenting guide that aims to help mothers support their daughters.
At the start of this book, therapist and coach O’Grady, author of Dial Down the Drama (2015), advises readers to create a “Powerful Parenting Message,” offering an example: “I trust my daughter and support her in her best next step. I choose to listen to, enjoy, and stay connected with my daughter.” The support may take many forms, she points out, and the “next step” may be hard to predict, but the book emphasizes the crucial role of listening throughout. Drawing on her own experiences as a mother and nearly 30years of counseling parents as a marriage and family therapist, O’Grady presents her readers with straightforward discussions of a wide array of subjects, from learning how to let go when daughters leave home for school—including how to retire the “monitoring” part of parenting, which she notes can stick around in unhealthy forms—to setting common-sense boundaries. Each chapter ends with an exercise to help mothers act on what they’re reading, such as journaling about a daughter’s positive traits: “One thing you are grateful for in your daughter,” “One thing you delight in about your daughter,” and so on. Over the course of this parenting manual, readers will find that O’Grady’s advice is uniformly sound and empathetic; one will immediately feel as if one is in caring hands, but there’s a toughness here, as well. Her willingness to tackle darker subjects, including what to do if one’s daughter is sexually assaulted, only makes its unaffected directness more valuable. The prose is appealingly direct throughout: “Are you an adult just because you turn eighteen? Neuroscience doesn’t think so.” The book’s many anecdotes about mothering struggles are instructive, but O’Grady’s own strong, patient advice is its highlight.
A forceful and wide-ranging advice book for readers raising young women.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77458-145-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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