A worthy and comforting book about one woman’s grief.
Southern California–based nurse and debut author Anderson shares the story of the loss of her 19-year-old son, and her journey through the next two years.
In the early morning hours of Oct. 16, 2016, the author received the kind of phone call that all parents dread. The eldest of her four children, Jeramie, nicknamed “Jem,” had been in a serious car accident. Hours later, she finally confirmed that he did not survive. “The loss of a child breaks you,” she writes in the preface to this slim, touching volume. Overwhelmed by grief, she faced a choice: “Do I…live my life trying in vain to be whole again….Or do I accept that this is me now? Do I allow and accept myself to be broken?” She says that writing letters to Jem after his death—which are included in this book—was her way of keeping him near. She originally wrote these missives on paper and an online journal, and they allowed her to give voice to her profound grief. She later started a Twitter account to read Jem’s old Twitter posts and his friends’ new ones. She also had his first tattoo replicated on her own ankle: “the lotus flower for inner strength and peace; Om for what was, what is, and what will be; and flames for the rage inside.” Overall, her memoir offers a tender account of her own acceptance of pain as part of her new reality. Some of the most poignant musings in the book deal with how she found it difficult to answer simple questions in social situations, such as “How many children do you have?” She felt that saying “three” somehow negated Jem’s existence, she says, so she finally decided to say, “I had four children. But one is no longer with us.” She effectively concludes, “Just put it out there. The truth. Even if it makes the person who asked the question uncomfortable.” Over the course of this reassuring remembrance, she comes to the realization that although there will always be tears in her future, there will also be times for laughter and joy.
A worthy and comforting book about one woman’s grief.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4808-7278-3
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
