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
Over-the-counter remedies for spiritual malaise—but sometimes plain aspirin works better than more sophisticated...
A sometimes inspiring, sometimes quotidian guide to life, distilled from the experiences of people who faced death.
Most of what the dying discover (about themselves and about their lives) is “usually too late to apply,” according to Kübler-Ross, best known for On Death and Dying (1991). She and hospice-worker Kessler (The Rights of the Dying, not reviewed) hope to motivate readers to work on “unfinished business” before they approach the end. Based on their experiences, case histories generally take the form of “I walked through the valley of the shadow of death and learned a lesson. . . . ” These are the lessons, 15 in all, ranging in subject from love and loss through fear, anger, patience, and happiness. Many of them are variations on familiar, almost trite, themes: find your authentic self, express your anger, learn to receive as well as give, remember that forgiveness is good for the soul. Others challenge very basic assumptions: it is not true, we are told, that children learn to love from being loved by their parents—in fact, most children are not loved so much as rewarded for good behavior. Kübler-Ross’s own experience of pain (she is now partially paralyzed as a result of a stroke) adds depth to these lessons: she describes how she struggled with—and vehemently expressed—anger over her fate and is still unable to forgive some who took advantage of her helplessness to steal from her.
Over-the-counter remedies for spiritual malaise—but sometimes plain aspirin works better than more sophisticated prescriptions.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-87074-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
Smashing gnats with a sledgehammer can create some pretty patterns on the page, but it’s a strange form of art.
A cynical, spirited assault on the self-help industry and its eager clients.
Veteran journalist Tiede has a simple thesis: “Self-improvement books are narcotics in ink,” he begins; “you must think, and mess up, for yourself,” he concludes. In between are entertaining eviscerations of the entire pantheon of self-help deities, including Laura Schlessinger (“a moralist, a stiff spine, a hanging judge, a smell fungus, a censor, a hall monitor”), M. Scott Peck, Leo Buscaglia, Jay Carter, Barbara Keesling, Susan Forward, John Bradshaw, Barbara King, Peter McWilliams, Deepak Chopra, Susanna Hoffman (“a wee writer with large knuckles”), and a host of others. Tiede believes these writers offer only poorly written platitudes and palliatives; he counters with a plea for old-fashioned Emersonian self-reliance and a recognition that “the rules of success do not exist, outside common sense, which does not always work.” After demolishing the “success” writers, Tiede dispatches those who focus on relationships, sex, addictions, religion, and a sort of catch-all category: the lonely, old, and fat. Frequently he fires broadsides at baby-boomers (whose values he abhors) and sprinkles throughout much peppery evidence of his impressive education: Alongside the names of the featherweight self-helpers are allusions to and/or quotations from heavyweights Thomas More, George Orwell, James Joyce, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Voltaire, Seneca, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Einstein, and others. Occasionally, in his zeal to point out the nakedness of the self-help emperors, Tiede does not notice his own nudity: He dangles a participle, assigns a work by Godwin (born in 1756) to the early 18th century, claims he saw a Sasquatch, and suggests the Pilgrims (1620) were the first European settlers in North America—apparently forgetting the colonists of Jamestown (1607). Ultimately, predictably, he blames all on the Usual Suspects: the news media, movies, television, celebrity- and youth-worship, and an addiction to pseudo-science (UFOs, astrology, etc.).
Smashing gnats with a sledgehammer can create some pretty patterns on the page, but it’s a strange form of art.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-777-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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