This earnest memoir about healing sometimes meanders but eventually finds its voice.
A divorced mother attempts suicide and suffers a brain injury in this debut book about trauma and recovery.
In June 2007, Hampton woke up in a hospital, not completely sure of why she was there. In the weeks that followed, she learned that a suicide attempt had left her with a “global, acquired brain injury.” Speech was difficult, and her sense of time became skewed. When she overheard her father planning what clothes to pick up from her house, Hampton asked, “I have a house?” She goes on to describe the circumstances that led to the suicide attempt: a breakup with her boyfriend, a terrible hangover, and a messy divorce. Stealing pills from a friend’s house, Hampton attempted to overdose on medication. Her 10-year-old son discovered her passed out on the kitchen floor when he came home from school. While struggling to recover from her brain injury, Hampton lost custody of her two sons to their father. A strict visitation schedule inspired her to get better. Hampton often dips into her back story: other suicide attempts; the death of her beloved brother Chris; her abusive ex-husband. All of these traumas began to heal when Hampton started to pursue alternative medicine, including acupuncture, massage, and something called “neurofeedback.” Eventually she became well enough to make peace with her past and her present. Hampton is candid in her storytelling, offering an unsentimental look at her own worst moments. While the chronology of the forthright memoir jumps back and forth, the characters recur in a fashion that’s easy to follow as Hampton reveals more and more of her past. She folds in quotes and titles from various authors’ inspirational books, from Byron Katie to Pema Chodron, that work to assure readers that this is ultimately a memoir of healing. There’s a tendency to explain what happened rather than to let the story unfold, but Hampton remains steadfast in creating a memoir that shows both the problem and the solution. The ending could stand more action and less exposition, but a penultimate scene reveals Hampton vacationing in Hawaii with her brother Ken, buoying the tale with much needed hope.
This earnest memoir about healing sometimes meanders but eventually finds its voice.Pub Date: May 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5329-6305-6
Page Count: 260
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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