A provocative sojourn through the wilderness of sexual addiction.
A sex addict’s bracing chronicle of erotic dependency.
Essayist Garza’s memoir begins in bed, where she is having sex with a man she neither knows well nor particularly cares for. This scene sets the tone for a narrative that never deviates from its intent to educate and engross readers with the random sexual escapades and private pains of a woman at the mercy of her addiction. What the author thrived upon was “an elaborate mix of shame and sexual excitement I had come to depend on since I was twelve.” She shares that her first source of shame manifested in her mediocre family life in Los Angeles, where she was raised Catholic with a mortgage broker father and a moody mother. Garza retreated into TV and video games and didn’t begin sexually fantasizing until she was barely a teenager, when her parents announced they were expecting another child. The author’s raging hormones feasted on Cinemax soft-core porn, then dial-up cybersex, and, later, high-speed internet porn, which became an obsession and a balm for her burgeoning social anxiety. She describes her high school years and her 20s through the many men with whom she had sex. Moving to Hawaii, she was ever eager to promote herself as an “adventurous, insatiable vixen always down to fuck,” with shame being the common aftereffect. At 30, Garza’s pursuit of sexual gratification became “darker and more intense” until she finally realized how much her robust and seemingly robotic sex life was damaging not only interpersonal relationships, but also the relationship she enjoyed with herself: “I prioritized the satisfaction of sexual release over everything else screaming inside of me Please stop.” A combination of therapy and prescription drugs proved only a short-term remedy; life forced Garza to cope once she found herself in love and on the threshold of marriage. Though exquisitely visceral and written with genuine emotion, the author’s fascinating odyssey ends too abruptly, lacking some of the curative details readers will be expecting.
A provocative sojourn through the wilderness of sexual addiction.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6337-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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
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