A powerfully personal account of using therapy to boldly move forward in life.
Jones offers a memoir of her recovery from the effects of traumatic events in her youth and teenage years.
The Texas-based author, a former forensic accountant,has written this book, she says, “so that I can teach others about the power of healing and the joy and love available when anyone chooses to heal.” She tells the story of her long marriage to her husband, Tristan, and their life moving from town to town in Texas and Colorado while caring for their serval cats; she also tells of her time in Hong Kong between 2016 and 2022, where she led a team of accountants. (Some names in the book have been changed, according to the author.) Gradually, with the help of a hypnotherapist, a trauma therapist, and a support group, she came to terms with memories of being sexually abused by a boy in high school and of experiencing abuse at the hands of her grandfather when she was a little girl. “For forty-five years—despite repeated attempts at unsuccessful couch therapy over the twenty-five years before hypnotherapy…I never put it together,” she writes of her time before her breakthrough. She was especially surprised at this difficulty, she says, because she’s “a natural-born problem-solver.” In the latter portions of the memoir, she tells of how she turned to astrology and notions of reincarnation to flesh out her story: “People we encounter each lifetime,” she writes, “are at various places in their soul’s journey toward enlightenment.”
Jones writes with a tone of openness and sincerity throughout this memoir. The most compelling parts of the work are when she links her recovery journey to broader issues of personal resilience: Her strong assertion that victims of abuse can overcome emotional injuries and live full lives is a bright thread running through the narrative, and she’s refreshingly candid about the setbacks that she faced on her own journey. She vividly compares her experience to peeling an onion: “As you peel, you sting from the burn and intense reality of what you discover,” she writes. “You stumble sometimes, taking steps backward to cope with the burn.” Some readers may find that some parts of the book could have used more clarification; at one point, for example, she writes that when a local city council made a decision forcing her and her husband to leave town with their servals (“never in my life had I experienced as much hatred directed at me as during those months”), the author goes on to say that they “literally had to move…overnight.” However, what happed next is unclear, because she writes that the place where she and her spouse chose to move “wasn’t ready for us and all the animals we would eventually accumulate there.” Such moments aside, though, her highly personal explanation of various aspects of trauma, such as triggers (“Though the backward steps can knock the wind out of us,” she writes, “they bring opportunities to evolve our healing”) make for an affecting remembrance.
A powerfully personal account of using therapy to boldly move forward in life.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2024
ISBN: 9798990430501
Page Count: 308
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
