A searingly eloquent and intelligent memoir.
A noted cookbook writer tells the story of her young-adulthood battles with mental illness and self-harming behaviors.
Abandoned and neglected by her mother and father when she was just 13, LeFavour (Pork: More than 50 Heavenly Meals that Celebrate the Glory of Pig, Delicious Pig, 2014, etc.) grew up virtually parent-free. Though never wanting for money, she began to experience depression in high school; in the years after college, her symptoms, which included irrational numerical fixations and bulimia, began to worsen. When the author was 24, she started therapy with a Vermont psychiatrist named Dr. Adam Kohl. The more she opened up, the more she discovered that she “wanted all of him—or none.” Taking masochistic pleasure in how “special” her own self-loathing made her feel, LeFavour began inflicting cigarette burns all over her body, which she only showed to Kohl. The marks were “[their] secret” but also a way for LeFavour to “punish” the psychiatrist for “activating my desire for him.” Their therapy sessions devolved into a contest of wills, with the doctor refusing to see an increasingly distraught LeFavour if she continued to self-harm. Told that their sessions would go on only if she went to a psychiatric hospital, the author voluntarily committed herself to Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Maryland, where she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. When she returned to therapy with Kohl, they probed her taste for humiliation, which she satisfied with damaged men or those who, like the doctor, were unavailable to her. Working against demons and an inner tyrant that often threatened to overwhelm her, LeFavour learned the lessons of self-forgiveness that helped her heal. Meticulously constructed from detailed physician notes and her own journals, the book is both disturbing and deeply cathartic. As LeFavour explores the destructive relationship between her mind and body in tandem with her unhealthy, quasi-erotic attachment to her psychiatrist, she lays bare the human hunger—no matter how perverse—for acceptance and love.
A searingly eloquent and intelligent memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2596-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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