A funny, frank, and fearless memoir.
A successful journalist’s account of how she came to terms with being a single woman over 40.
Feisty and independent, MacNicol (co-editor: The 10 Habits of Highly Successful Women, 2014) had “taken herself from waitress to well-paid writer to business owner” in the span of 20 years. Now she was a glamorous Manhattanite with a wide circle of friends and access to famous and accomplished people. Yet as she neared 40, she realized she lacked two things society deemed necessary for female success: a man and a baby. In this sharp, intimate memoir, the author chronicles the eventful years following the 40th birthday that found her unattached and unsure about her path forward. Men walked in and out of her real and online lives as she traveled to offbeat locations for stories. While she still saw the women friends she had come to know during her 20s, responsibilities to partners, husbands, and children inevitably loosened ties. A close relationship to her married sister allowed her to witness firsthand the vagaries of matrimony and the rigors of parenting, while her housewife mother increasingly came to symbolize the life MacNicol “actively unwanted.” The contrast between the outcomes of her mother’s lifestyle and her own became especially clear as she witnessed her mother’s decline into dementia. The author became painfully aware that the choice to forge a life built around family was no safeguard to “being left alone” in the end and that, ultimately, “life was not a savings plan, accrued now for enjoyment later.” Moving through the years without a ready-made blueprint was a struggle, but one that had been “terrifying, and then exhausting, and then delightful.” Unapologetic in her embrace of the ups and downs of the improvised solo life, MacNicol offers a refreshing view of the possibilities—and pitfalls—personal freedom can offer modern women.
A funny, frank, and fearless memoir.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6313-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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