An affectionate, insightful inquiry into a troubled life and untimely death.
A mother’s heart-rending recollection of her daughter, who died of an accidental heroin overdose.
Schiller (Watermark, 2016) opens with an affecting chapter that contrasts the joyful first day of her daughter Giana’s life in January 1980 with the day in January 2014 when she received a phone call from The Rose House, a treatment program in Colorado, informing her that Giana had been found dead. The author, addressing Giana directly, wonders what might have changed the course of her life or if her lot was somehow predetermined: “I wonder now if there was a little nugget inside you, something that would burst into heartache later.” Perhaps childhood asthma and allergies eventually led Giana down a dark path: In a household of seven, she learned that she got attention for being ill and would later have inpatient stays for anorexia as well as substance abuse. The beginning of the memoir remembers Giana’s happier days, including private Quaker schooling, competitive swimming, and enrolling at the University of Vermont. Giana returned to school to study veterinary nursing when her beloved dog Abby had health challenges; Schiller speculates that Abby’s death from cancer may have tipped Giana into “pain-quelling drug use.” In melancholy, striking prose, the author outlines her regret—not being more assertive or asking her daughter difficult questions. The cycles of treatment, recovery, and relapse that follow (perhaps inevitably) become repetitive, but fragments of second-person narration develop a genuine intimacy that keeps readers engaged with Giana’s story. Excerpts from Giana’s journals and letters and black-and-white family photos add context and texture. A minute-by-minute account of Giana’s final day—an ordinary set of errands and conversations, documented by her sister, Louisa—is a sobering reminder that death can be shockingly abrupt. In the somewhat anticlimactic final chapters, Schiller records her experiences of Didion-esque magical thinking about her daughter’s continued presence, and she argues passionately for the decriminalization of drugs.
An affectionate, insightful inquiry into a troubled life and untimely death.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68463-008-0
Page Count: 245
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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