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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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