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
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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