A creative and entertaining shared memoir of identity, place, and their indelible connection to each other.
A memoir in essays about the author’s relationship with her mother and their travels together.
From long road trips to a Magic Mike live show in Las Vegas to a trip to visit family in China, Wang explores several themes familiar to immigrant memoirs: practicality and frugality, wonder at America’s bounty and beauty, fear of becoming easy prey for scams, and a search for belonging and relief in invisibility. The author balances entertaining fashion and other allusions gleaned from TV and her time as a reporter and editor at Refinery29 with piercing cultural observations. These insights are incisive and almost reverent, perhaps only possible from “new Americans newly inhabiting the middle class.” Wang makes clear that she collaborated closely with her mother, Qing, whom she describes as a “tiger mom with a temper,” and even gave her editing power. “This is our memoir—a long personal essay, if you will—and it was forged through shared fact-checking,” writes the author. “Qing was the first person to read each chapter as it was written, and she is this book’s first editor. Every word you read here has first passed under her red pen.” Restricted to earlier chapters, Qing’s storied wrath and personal background become somewhat dulled, and brief discussions of such elements as a precarious family dynamic leave readers searching for a missed reference. While this structure reduces some of the narrative tension, it is a strong, refreshing counterpoint to the story of immigrant suffering that Qing insists Americans prefer. Eschewing voyeurism for an empathetic, nuanced study of a subject never fully revealed, Wang drives to the heart of how a daughter comes to know her mother as someone with a life beyond motherhood. Readers will finish the book hoping that this mother-daughter pair will continue to collaboratively inch toward some of the things left veiled or otherwise unsaid in this collection.
A creative and entertaining shared memoir of identity, place, and their indelible connection to each other.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9780593490921
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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