Could be a useful and sympathetic model for others who are integrating writing into therapy.
A personal history of overcoming poverty, neglect, and a parent’s mental illness.
Ketterman’s debut memoir begins with a biblical quote: “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” In the first narrative scene, adult Ketterman experiences a religious awakening in the church led by her godfather, Pastor Johnny, who “moved in the gift of prophecy”; she collapses, limp, onto the floor. “Leave her alone,” cautions Pastor Johnny. “God has begun a deep healing within her….Glory, glory, glory!” And so the book’s audience is thus delimited: it’s for people who believe in the healing power of faith. Ketterman takes care to articulate her spiritual experiences as qualitatively different from the religious delusions suffered by her mother, who was ultimately diagnosed with a schizoaffective disorder, and also from the mental impairments of her father, who died of a brain tumor when she was just a teenager. She effectively outlines the difficulties of growing up in such an unwell environment—the social stigma, the poverty, the abuse and neglect, the necessity of acting as parent not only to herself but to her younger brother and sister. But Ketterman, a curriculum designer who was named teacher of the year, writes like the administrator and educator she is, rather than as a novelist. Despite chapter headers that ooze with pathos—“My Mother’s Declaration: Relief, Guilt, Shame, and Regret”—she doesn’t dig deeply into her or anyone else’s emotions. It’s irrefutable that she shouldered burdens and responsibilities no child should have to bear, but that constantly reinforced theme ultimately feels one-dimensional, and the many examples of how she overcame those hardships begin to read more like a resume than a memoir. In the final chapter, Ketterman reveals that this book evolved, in part, out of a 12-step recovery program, that it is her “testimony.” The book’s cathartic, self-focused tone, then, is completely in line with its function as part of the author’s therapy; toward that purpose, it succeeds.
Could be a useful and sympathetic model for others who are integrating writing into therapy.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0990979920
Page Count: 268
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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