A tough, uplifting account of a spouse’s terminal illness—and helpful advice for survivors.
In this debut memoir, a woman reflects on the life lessons she learned from caring for her mortally ill husband.
Welser relates how she was in her mid-30s, climbing the corporate ladder to greater and greater success, when her life took an unexpected turn. After experiencing a flurry of health issues, her husband, Ray, developed glioblastoma multiforme grade IV, a type of brain cancer so serious that the National Institutes of Health nicknamed it “The Terminator.” Ray lived less than a year after his diagnosis, and suddenly the author found herself a widow. In these pages, she recounts the story of Ray’s illness, told in part through excerpts from the journal she kept throughout the ordeal. “I need a scorecard to keep track,” goes one such entry, “but yesterday, we met with the medical oncologist and the radiation oncologist” is set for today. She fills these sections of her memoir with both the details of her husband’s medical condition and her own striking memories of the experience. “Life support machines make sounds that embed themselves in your brain,” she writes. “They haunt you long after you hear them.” She takes readers through every step of Ray’s decline, including how his cancer affected him mentally, and it’s all written with a direct immediacy. Eventually, the story moves to a hospice and then a funeral home, after which Welser turned her attention to how to live in a world suddenly very changed: “Positive thinking and affirmations help the brain reset itself.” In the final section of her book, she advocates the kind of “emotional agility” that helped her survive.
Readers who have been through personal or medical trials like the author’s will appreciate this upbeat approach as well as Welser’s useful advice for surviving the journey (such as having a “go-to” bag that includes Band-Aids, antibacterial spray, and extra pens). This combination of dogged optimism and practical counsel animates the whole volume, adding it to the subgenre of books by authors who have coped with terminal illness. Readers get the doctor visits, the daily struggles, the momentary flutterings of hope, and the sad resignation that accompany the end of a loved one’s life. This is very effectively done, and Welser transitions her recollections smoothly to the memoir’s final section, which concentrates more on the life lessons she drew from her horrible experience of suddenly finding herself living in a world without the husband with whom she’d planned on spending her entire life. Her guidance in this strand of her story is uniformly quiet and encouraging: “Take a deep breath. A loved one being diagnosed with an illness like this one forces us to face our own mortality.” One strategy that the author stresses involves a “bucket list”—the common self-help idea of creating an inventory of things you want to do before you die in order to feel that you’ve lived life to the fullest. Her own list includes such items as “feed a koala” and “participate in a flash mob.” Welser’s invitation for readers to both compile their own lists and put them into practice will fill fellow travelers with much needed hope in their worst hours.
A tough, uplifting account of a spouse’s terminal illness—and helpful advice for survivors.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8885040761
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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