An eloquent, poignant memoir.
An acclaimed food writer and memoirist’s account of the codependent relationship she had with her charming and outrageous—but also very difficult—mother.
Altman (Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw, 2016, etc.) was raised by a beautiful Manhattan singer named Rita. Obsessed with makeup, clothes, and her youthful brush with fame, Rita was both narcissistic and overwhelming. Rather than accept her daughter as a girl who loved to wear suits and had no interest in the world of celebrity, Rita attempted to remake her in her own glamorous image, with results that were as humorous as they were painful. Indeed, the only time Rita would show her daughter the approval for which she hungered was when Altman dressed fashionably and flaunted her body. Deeply attached to each other but prone to endless fighting, Altman and her mother became each other’s “intoxicant of choice” until the author finally moved from New York to New England to live with and then marry a woman named Susan. Over the next two decades, the author built a quiet, independent life apart from her mother, allowing her the space to forge her own identity. Yet she still connected with Rita daily by telephone and watched her spend money—which Altman quietly replaced—on the expensive makeup her girlish heart desired rather than the health care her aging body required. Then Rita suffered a debilitating fall that left her unable to “use the bathroom, organize her pills, or navigate her space in a wheelchair.” Altman suddenly realized that, like it or not, the mother from whom she had struggled to break free and who she once thought was “unbreakable [and] unstoppable” was now totally dependent on her. Funny, raw, and tender, Altman’s book examines the inevitable role reversals that occur in parent-child relationships while laying bare a mother-daughter relationship that is both entertaining and excruciating.
An eloquent, poignant memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-18158-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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