A schmaltzy but affecting memoir of a mostly vanished world.
The debut author, who has a long history in publishing as an editor, shares her stories about coming-of-age on the Lower East Side.
Webern’s minutely detailed memoir of growing up Jewish in downtown Manhattan from the 1930s through the early ’50s excellently evokes an era of pushcarts and projects, of hard times and harsh realities. Although the author doesn’t romanticize her memories, she drenches her anecdotes in affection. Even when her nearest and dearest are behaving their worst (as they often are), Webern writes with an eye for forgiveness—or at least understanding—and not judgment; that’s not to say she’s a pushover, but much of what she says comes with an Old World–style shrug. At one point, she thought nothing of gaming Eleanor Roosevelt’s free milk line: “We each got on line twice,” she writes of herself and her siblings. “Once with our hats on and once with our hats off.” Later, when she returned a dropped wallet to its proper owner, her mother screamed, “How do you know it was his? You think he’d tell you if it wasn’t his?” The younger Webern is, the better her stories are, and there’s a disarming naïveté in the way she talks about her mother’s various scams or how she earned her own “button thief” moniker. Every once in a while, she catches readers up short with the sheer, unaffected beauty of her observations. When her grandmother died, for example, she noticed that her mother’s once-lovely singing voice had become hoarse: “she has lost her voice crying for her dead mother.” However, there’s a perilously thin line between remembering and merely going on and on. Consider one saga, which begins innocuously enough with “My mother had a flair for plucking chickens.” After almost 15 pages of chicken filth, blood, and decapitations, readers will have had more than enough. The author’s seeming lack of an inner censor as a narrator blesses her with a hugely distinctive voice; on the other hand, a stronger editor might’ve helped. Still, readers who luxuriated in the 1987 Woody Allen movie Radio Days may find the 300 pages here to be not enough, as it shares that movie’s unique sense of time and place, of quarrelsome but beloved family.
A schmaltzy but affecting memoir of a mostly vanished world.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-944697-11-2
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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