Heatley powerfully demonstrates that when lives are messiest, art remains cathartic, even redemptive.
A family steeped in 12-step recovery risks addiction to 12-step programs.
Heatley (My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down, 2008), who has provided illustrations for the New York Times, New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and other publications, pairs deceptively simple drawings with transparently direct text. Though the book is divided into 12 chapters, it doesn’t really involve working all 12 steps until the last. Before that, Heatley delves deeply into a life that is as complex and messy as any, that refuses to untangle through easy epiphanies, and that doesn’t resolve itself the way readers may anticipate. Throughout his life, the artist has been drawn to—and suspicious of—12-step programs since his parents were involved in numerous ones, often simultaneously. He heard the jargon and witnessed the results as his mother transformed herself (at least temporarily) through Overeaters Anonymous and changed the family’s dynamic enough to divorce his father, who had issues with debt (and at least borderline sexual abuse of his sons). At various times, the author was addicted to pornography, spending, shoplifting, and attracting romantic attention. He and his wife fought frequently, most often over their financial instability but about his various 12-step programs as well, which she felt he was using as an escape from domestic tension. He felt he was becoming addicted to those arguments. He saw his brother walk a thin line between spiritual fervor and madness, and he resented the way that his mother responded to every complication in any of their lives with 12-step bromides. He supplemented his programs with therapy, and he found counseling and 12-stepping to be at odds with each other. “It was clear to me that I had a spiritual disease,” he admits, yet finding the cure proved confusing. This graphic narrative, rich in detail and reflection, shouldn’t be read quickly in one sitting but rather savored.
Heatley powerfully demonstrates that when lives are messiest, art remains cathartic, even redemptive.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-375-42540-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
“Life is the biggest bargain. You get it for free,” reads one of the Yiddish sayings that introduce the chapters, in a book...
Memory comes alive in this compelling amalgam of drawing, narrative and archival photography.
A prolific illustrator of children’s books and an artist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and other magazines, the author made a major leap into memoir with Mendel’s Daughter (2006), his debut in the genre. Where that well-reviewed volume focused on the Holocaust from the perspective of his mother, this follow-up continues the story of Lemelman’s family through the author’s Brooklyn boyhood. Though there’s an innocence to his tales of working at his father’s candy store—squashing cockroaches, playing pranks and exploring the worlds of the streets (“There was always something going on at the Market…Life was everywhere”)—this was not an idyllic childhood, nor is it rendered sentimentally. After immigrating to America following World War II, Lemelman’s parents turned family life into an ongoing battle as they balanced the nonstop demands of a neighborhood shop with the challenges of raising two rambunctious sons. “Deh Tateh” had served in the Soviet army after surviving the Holocaust, complained incessantly about life in America and barely hid his alcoholism. “Der Mameh” refused to back down to her husband, insisted she was more of a help in the store than he thought she was and left her son feeling deprived. The author and his brother Bernard became both allies and antagonists within the family dynamic. It all comes to vivid life through the artist’s drawing and through a narrative that conjures the voices of his dead parents to complement the author’s perspective, which retains a childlike spirit. The family chronicle unfolds against the backdrop of a tumultuous era—the assassination of a president, the escalation of the war in Vietnam and, perhaps most significant for the family, the changing demographics of a neighborhood that initially brought new waves of customers but saw a rise of anti-Semitism that drove so many families and businesses from what had long been their home.
“Life is the biggest bargain. You get it for free,” reads one of the Yiddish sayings that introduce the chapters, in a book that is both a celebration and an affirmation of life.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-004-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
All dissertations should be this much fun. (35 photos and illustrations)
An amusing compilation of deceptions dating from the Middle Ages to the aftermath of September 11, morphed into print from a Web site initially created to store the author’s thesis research.
Boese, a grad student at UC San Diego, defines a hoax as a “deliberately deceptive act that has succeeded in capturing the attention (and, ideally, the imagination) of the public.” Included under this broad heading are the Jackalope, a species of antlered rabbit able to mimic human voices; a South African crop circle made by extraterrestrials that featured the BMW logo; and Snowball, the 87-pound kitten whose size was due to its mother having been callously abandoned near a nuclear lab. Actually, Snowball wasn’t intended as a hoax; the cat’s owner manipulated the photo and sent a few friends the image, which eventually made its way around the world with an accompanying narrative. (Boese similarly stretches his own definition to include Orson Welles’s radio broadcast The War of the Worlds, even though the program wasn’t meant to trick listeners.) The author believes that while folks have always been gullible, the form and function of hoaxes change over time. For example, during the 1990s, people began to feel anxious about how technology and the Internet were affecting their daily lives. This anxiety fueled the success of a 1994 hoax in PC Computing magazine, which published an article “reporting” that Congress would soon make it illegal to drive drunk on “the information highway.” When a 1998 Internet posting by a New Mexico physicist claimed that the Alabama legislature had voted to change the mathematical value of pi from 3.14159 . . . to “the Biblical value” of 3.0, a bewildered legislature was swamped with calls from angry citizens. Despite its origin as thesis material, the work is not meant to be academic, and there is no analysis of any kind.
All dissertations should be this much fun. (35 photos and illustrations)Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-525-94678-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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