Screenwriter and novelist Forrest (Cherries in the Snow, 2005, etc.) delivers an intense story of madness and redemption.
Though the author, a transplanted Brit, was enjoying some success as a writer in New York City, she writes, “my quirks had gone beyond eccentric, past the warm waters of weird to those cold, deep patches of sea where people lose their lives.” She was cutting, bingeing and purging, clinging to disastrous relationships and feeling suicidal. She found help with Dr. R., but still attempted suicide soon after starting to see him. During the next decade, Dr. R. became her friend, mentor and life raft. Forrest says much about Dr. R., but concludes, “I liked how he saw me. It’s that simple.” After eight years of therapy, Dr. R. died without warning; Forrest learned of his death through an e-mail. Angered and confused by being left behind so abruptly, many of her old habits returned. Still, Dr. R.’s voice remained in her head—sometimes speaking though her cat—gently easing her pain, giving her strength. A famous movie star, GH, became her lover and just as quickly left her. Forrest’s narrative follows the now-familiar arc of being lost then found, but the profoundly precise writing sets it apart. The author provides plenty of pop-culture references and name-drops like crazy—Heath Ledger, Brad Pitt, Gloria Steinem—but readers are never sure if these people are actually there. Does she really see Monica Lewinsky each time she is crying in a West Village café? There are mysteries here, but a pervasive honesty as well. A brilliantly realized memoir of surprise and startling beauty.
Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59051-446-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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
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
© 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.
