Keaton sheds her whimsical persona to explore difficult burdens that those with an unstable sibling will recognize.
In this melancholic addition to Keaton’s two previous works of memoir (Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty, 2014, etc.), she strives to understand her troubled younger brother.
Two poignant passages bookend the author’s brief account of her relationship with her brother, Randy Hall. In the first, she recalls the pair at 5 and 3, sharing a bedroom in their Southern California home, Keaton “glancing down from my top-bunk apartment in the sky and seeing Randy’s anxious bobbing head, his fear of the dark, and his sweet if hapless face….Why couldn’t he stop seeing ghosts lurking in shadows that weren’t there?” The second depicts the siblings, now in their 70s, sitting quietly as Keaton holds her ailing brother’s hand and strokes his hair during a visit to his nursing home. In between these moments of intimacy, Keaton admits to long periods of estrangement from her sensitive, self-destructive, alcoholic brother, who “took failure and wore it the way Hester Pryne wore her scarlet letter,” spending an isolated life writing, collaging, drinking, and existing by grace of the support—financial and otherwise—of his parents and sisters. While never completely free of worry or involvement, the author discloses that “while I was playing the firebrand Louise Bryant [in the film Reds], he’d attempted to gas himself in the garage….I told myself I didn’t have time to linger on my family’s problems, and certainly not Randy’s.” Keaton thoughtfully wrestles with her guilty conscience while attempting to assemble a clearer picture of her brother’s nature. To do so, she relies heavily on excerpts from his poems, prose, and letters and those of family members. Yet Hall—described variously as “a schizoid personality” by a doctor, an “Almost Artist” by Keaton, and a “genius” by his idealizing mother—remains inscrutable and difficult to sympathize with.
Keaton sheds her whimsical persona to explore difficult burdens that those with an unstable sibling will recognize.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-451-49450-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A welcome addition to the literature on immigration told by an author who understands the issue like few others.
The debut book from “one of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard.”
In addition to delivering memorable portraits of undocumented immigrants residing precariously on Staten Island and in Miami, Cleveland, Flint, and New Haven, Cornejo Villavicencio, now enrolled in the American Studies doctorate program at Yale, shares her own Ecuadorian family story (she came to the U.S. at age 5) and her anger at the exploitation of hardworking immigrants in the U.S. Because the author fully comprehends the perils of undocumented immigrants speaking to journalist, she wisely built trust slowly with her subjects. Her own undocumented status helped the cause, as did her Spanish fluency. Still, she protects those who talked to her by changing their names and other personal information. Consequently, readers must trust implicitly that the author doesn’t invent or embellish. But as she notes, “this book is not a traditional nonfiction book….I took notes by hand during interviews and after the book was finished, I destroyed those notes.” Recounting her travels to the sites where undocumented women, men, and children struggle to live above the poverty line, she reports her findings in compelling, often heart-wrenching vignettes. Cornejo Villavicencio clearly shows how employers often cheat day laborers out of hard-earned wages, and policymakers and law enforcement agents exist primarily to harm rather than assist immigrants who look and speak differently. Often, cruelty arrives not only in economic terms, but also via verbal slurs and even violence. Throughout the narrative, the author explores her own psychological struggles, including her relationships with her parents, who are considered “illegal” in the nation where they have worked hard and tried to become model residents. In some of the most deeply revealing passages, Cornejo Villavicencio chronicles her struggles reconciling her desire to help undocumented children with the knowledge that she does not want "kids of my own." Ultimately, the author’s candor about herself removes worries about the credibility of her stories.
A welcome addition to the literature on immigration told by an author who understands the issue like few others.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-399-59268-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Aunty Entity and the lady who showed Mick Jagger his best moves will delight in Turner’s lightly spun memoir.
Rock-’n’-soul icon Turner is happy at last, and she wants the world to know it.
The love story of the title is specific: The 78-year-old singer has been with her German mate for 33 years, and though bits and pieces of her body have been failing and misbehaving—she recounts a stroke, kidney failure, cancer, and other maladies—her love is going strong. It’s also generalized: Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, is enchanted by the world, from her childhood countryside to the shores of Lake Zurich, where she has lived nearly half her life. There was another love story, of course, the one that fans will know and lament: her marriage to the drug-addicted, philandering Ike Turner, of whom she writes, pointedly, “at this point in my life, I’ve spent far more time without Ike than with him.” The author emerges from these pages as self-aware and hungry for knowledge and experience. Who knew that she was a dedicated reader of Dante as well as a “favorite aunt” of Keith Richards and a practitioner of Buddhism of such long standing that Ike himself demanded that she lose her shrine? The gossip is light, though she’s clear on the many reasons she broke away from Ike. She’s also forgiving, and as for others in her circle over the years, she calls Mel Gibson “Melvin” because of his “little boy quality,” though she doesn’t approve of certain bad behavior of his. Mostly, her portraits of such figures as David Bowie and Bryan Adams are affectionate, and the secrets she reveals aren’t terribly shocking. Those fishnet stockings and short skirts, she lets slip, were more practical than prurient, the stockings running less easily than nylons and the short skirts “easier for dancing because they left my legs free."
Fans of Aunty Entity and the lady who showed Mick Jagger his best moves will delight in Turner’s lightly spun memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9824-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2018
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