Candid, brave, and generous.
How a marital crisis became a catalyst for a painful but ultimately enlightening journey into the depths of the human heart.
Though raised by loving parents, Melton (Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed, 2013) felt socially ill at ease and unworthy. At age 10, she found temporary release in the bulimic cycle of bingeing and purging. As a teenager, she hid her vulnerability behind a mask of trendiness and toughness, divorced her sexuality from all emotion, and began drinking. In college, she learned what she perceived to be the “rules” of female success: “thinness is beauty. Beauty is power. Power is Being Chosen by the Boys.” Melton found the popularity she desired but at the cost of becoming an alcoholic. When she met her future husband, Craig, he seemed the embodiment of the “wholesomeness and goldenness” that she felt would save her. The two wed after the author, who aborted their first child, became pregnant for the second time. Motherhood forced her to get her alcoholism and bulimia under control, but she felt lonely even with a family to care for and resentful toward Craig for imposing sex on her. After creating a successful blog and book that gave her truth-telling spaces she longed for, her world suddenly collapsed. Craig admitted to multiple infidelities, and the pair separated. During the course of therapy, the author realized that she had been seeking perfection in a man who was as needy and broken as she was. To become whole, each needed to own parts of themselves—Melton, the body, for Craig, the mind—they had disregarded. As the two gradually accepted their flaws and limitations, they learned to communicate more directly and honestly with each other. Though the memoir sometimes reads like a self-help book rather than a narrative, it nevertheless tells a compelling story about self-discovery and the nature of mature love.
Candid, brave, and generous.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07572-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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