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THE SHAPE OF THE EYE

Name: THE SHAPE OF THE EYE
Author: George Estreich
ISBN: 978-0399163340

A MEMOIR

by George Estreich ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2013

A poignantly eloquent meditation on the genetics of belonging.

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The moving, heartbreakingly lucid story about how a family learned to cope with, and ultimately appreciate, a daughter born with Down syndrome.

Friends had told poet Estreich (Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body, 2004) and his scientist wife that a “second child changes everything.” Neither, however, was prepared for the news that the baby girl they would name Laura had Trisomy 21, Down syndrome. Both were devastated; but for the author, the diagnosis had even more profound implications. John Langdon Down, the Victorian-era physician after whom Laura’s condition was named, had called it the “‘Mongolian idiocy.” “Twisted, weird, and wrong” as this label was, it named not only Laura’s diagnosis, but also the half-Japanese Estreich’s own ethnic identity. “To have a child, any child, is to thrust ordinary mysteries into the foreground: mortality, love, inheritance.” As he and his wife struggled to come to terms with their daughter’s condition and the future it portended, Laura suffered heart failure and had to be force-fed through nasal tubes. Yet the little girl survived. Soon, the visits to doctors, cardiologists, nutritionists and speech pathologists and other accommodations the family made for Laura began to feel normal. What struck Estreich as bizarre was the negativity, both intended and unwitting, that pervaded the accounts he read about Down syndrome. Laura was a child first and not a diagnosis. And the fate written into the 47 chromosomes of her DNA was no more tragic than that of other children who carried their own genetic risks hidden within supposedly “normal” bodies. With the humility born of painful experience, Estreich concludes that “it is not the chromosome, but our response to it, that shapes the contour of a life.”

A poignantly eloquent meditation on the genetics of belonging.

Pub Date: April 18, 2013

ISBN: 978-0399163340

Page Count: 288

Publisher: TarcherPerigee

Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013

Categories:

FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS

BECAUSE I REMEMBER TERROR, FATHER, I REMEMBER YOU

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BECAUSE I REMEMBER TERROR, FATHER, I REMEMBER YOU

by Sue William Silverman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1996

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A woman's excrutiatingly painful and explicit account of 14 years of incestuous abuse. With great courage and startling compassion, Silverman tells the story of how her father, once chief counsel to the secretary of the Interior and later an international banker, made her his sexual companion. Beginning when she was four years old, the incest escalated from fondling in the bathtub to oral and finally full-fledged and frequent vaginal intercourse. With her mother's unspoken acquiesence (``I was a present to her husband'') Silverman became a willing instrument in calming her beloved father's frequent rages. Extraordinarily frank (``It feels good, yes. I discover its pleasure before its shame''), Silverman is able to recreate the emotional trail that leads from terror to pleasure, from confusion and fear to disassociation. Two new personalities emerge to take the brunt of her father's sexual forays. One is Dina, passive and wanting only to please; the other is Celeste, angry, challenging, and hungry. But even with these guardian personae, the little girl Sue remains acutely vulnerable. As a second-grader, she felt so unprotected that she dropped out of school for a year; a few years later, during an especially traumatic period, she spent most of three months sleeping. As Silverman enters adolescence, she struggles to break away, but not until she leaves for college does her father abruptly stop his sexual marauding. Silverman spends the next 30 years trying to understand and control both her sexual aggressiveness and her self-starvation—an attempt, in essence, to make her abused body disappear. With therapy and a loving husband, she succeeds and, almost unbelievably, comes to terms with her parents as well. Harrowing in its depiction of savage violation and profoundly moving in its portrait of a child's fear, confusion, and desperate search for a safe place.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-8203-1870-1

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Univ. of Georgia

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY

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FAMILY

AMERICAN WRITERS REMEMBER THEIR OWN

edited by Sharon Sloan Fiffer & Steve Fiffer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 28, 1996

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A collection of eloquent essays solicited from high-powered writers that nevertheless smacks a bit of ``What I Did on My Summer Vacation,'' except that the subject is family. The Fiffers (editors of last year's anthology Home) have convinced some substantial talent to choose a pivotal moment or person in the circle they consider family and write about it. Except for Bob Shacochis, who writes about the torture of overcoming infertility, the contributors to this volume accentuate the positive. When nothing else will serve, Whitney Otto, the author of the novel How to Make an American Quilt, chooses her cat Kali to exemplify family bonds. But it may be that these writers have voiced their various family-oriented rages and confusion in earlier works and can now discuss the idea of family from a more benevolent perspective. Elizabeth McCracken's charming essay is a celebration of her first cousin twice removed, also an Elizabeth, who was a dancer and a single mother long before it was fashionable. Alice Hoffman writes about advice from her grandmother; Deborah Tannen about missing her father; Beverly Donofrio about a dynamic neighbor. Other contributors include Brent Staples on his Chicago boyhood, Edwidge Danticat on her father's life as a cabdriver, and bell hooks on her wonderfully eccentric grandparents, who were together for more than 70 years. Geoffrey Wolff's lively entry on his father, Duke, nicely captures the ambivalence of family relationships: ``always fluid . . . to be emotionally exact is to be inconsistent.'' A reassuring read, these skillfully crafted pieces plumb the nurturing aspect of family as opposed to the dark side (neglect, abuse, abandonment) that frequently fuels contemporary writers.