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THE INHERITANCE

An inspired use of the graphic format to weave a narrative with a power beyond words alone.

An ambitious graphic memoir that combines text, drawings, and photos into a meditation on what divides and unites us.

Throughout this impressively audacious book, Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia, effectively conveys her attempts to come to terms with her fraught familial roots in an Italian Alpine village, a map of which was displayed in the family’s living room. When she asked about it as a child, she was told to leave it alone, or “you’ll start a huge fight over a pointless problem.” Part of the problem was that the village had two names: Karezol as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Carisolo when it became part of Italy. This division would become symbolic of so many rifts that became parts of the author’s inheritance, including disconnections among generations in the household, between parents and children, and the disharmony caused by a grandmother tragically losing her memory. Furthermore, the gender divisions among her siblings resulted in varying levels of responsibilities and expectations. Povinelli’s family settled in Buffalo, New York, but their move to Shreveport, Louisiana, when the author was a toddler exposed yet more divisions. Eventually, she realized that her familial experiences were “problems inserted into a national trouble with a broad American grammar.” The text is incisive and refreshingly concise, but Povinelli’s art is what truly shines: Her drawings are evocatively eloquent, particularly as she chronicles her struggles with “visual panic attacks” caused by living in “a haunted house whose walls had long ago fallen in on themselves.” Expanding her personal story outward, the author speaks to experiences that will resonate with anyone struggling with familial legacies. “Even if I could have found all the dispersed pieces of our shattered inheritance, they would no longer have fit together,” she writes. “The compressions of memory had fundamentally deformed the fragments and lodged foreign material into their heart."

An inspired use of the graphic format to weave a narrative with a power beyond words alone.

Pub Date: March 12, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-4780-1403-4

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Duke Univ.

Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021

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I'M GLAD MY MOM DIED

The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.

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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

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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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

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