Cleareyed, honest and grounded.
A best-selling author’s thoughtful examination of her life and the creative process that has defined it.
Shapiro (Devotion, 2010, etc.) offers an intimate look at why, after the many ups and downs she has experienced in both her life and her career, she is “still writing.” The acts of living and literary inscription are inextricably intertwined for Shapiro. To talk about one, she must necessarily talk about the other. With this in mind, she divides her book into three sections: beginnings, middles and ends. Shapiro credits a “lonely, isolated childhood,” which made reading and writing “as necessary as breathing,” as what set her on the path to authorship. At the same time, she lays out what she sees as the necessary conditions for the work of writing: for example, understanding where and how you create best and giving yourself permission to not know where the act of writing will take you. “Writing, after all, is an act of faith.” The middles are trickier to negotiate. Shapiro was in midlife when she published her first memoir, which dealt with the “mess” of her 20s. Not long after that, her infant developed life-threatening seizures. Finding structure in the midst of chaos, being willing to start again and learning to live with uncertainty were the keys to her personal survival, just as they are key for writers lost in the morass of middledom. Endings are both a reward and a challenge. Shapiro is settled and happy, and she is successful enough to write full time. But she also knows her world is fragile. Despite the difficulties inherent in the writing life, it is still what she would choose, not only because it has forced her to transcend herself, but also because it is something she must do. “The only reason to be a writer,” she notes, is because you have to.”
Cleareyed, honest and grounded.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2140-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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