A candid, sharply etched self-portrait.
A fiction writer explores the causes, and consequences, of her desire to be perfect.
Tallent (Creative Writing/Stanford Univ.; Mendocino Fire: Stories, 2015, etc.) makes her debut as a memoirist with an intimate examination of her quest for perfection, which has dogged her since childhood. Perfectionism, she writes, “is set apart from other forms of trouble by the inflamed genius of its self-abuse and its pleasurableness.” It tyrannizes her by “dangling before me flawless elizabeths who would transcend limitations lightly, with every hair in place”: a fantasy woman with the power “to intensify, focus, motivate.” To those who do not suffer it, perfectionism can seem like “ambition on steroids,” but Tallent is ever aware of its debilitating effects. Early success as a writer caused her to feel “quickened self-consciousness, elevated standards” that led to an inability to write for more than 20 years. Sentences she created “written in pursuit of transcendence were dull. For the sake of perfection I took a voice, my own, and twisted until mischance and error and experiment were wrung from it, and with them any chance of aliveness.” Seeking the sources of her obsession, Tallent learned that her mother, also a perfectionist, refused to hold her newborn daughter because she saw a scratch near the infant’s eyelid—self-inflicted in utero—that aroused her revulsion. Nineteen when her mother disclosed this, Tallent felt relief at knowing, at last, “a necessary piece of my life.” Besides causing inhibition, self-doubt, mistrust, anxiety, and depression, perfectionism is characterized by self-absorption—“the failure to be interested in things as they are, or people as they are”—a trait that unfortunately focuses the narrative too narrowly on its wounded protagonist. As she portrays herself as a girlfriend, wife, bookstore clerk, analysand, and writing program director, Tallent admits that among her shortcomings was a tendency to judge others harshly “with perfectionist righteousness.” The author’s prose is dense, precise, and often lyrical, but the relentless energy of her long sentences and pageslong paragraphs sometimes feels overwhelming.
A candid, sharply etched self-portrait.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-241037-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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