An absorbing, unpredictable life story inside and outside the church.
Grossman’s engaging debut memoir contrasts her years as a postulant nun with her later, secular life.
During her all-American upbringing in small-town Illinois, Grossman defined her life by her relationships to both the Catholic Church and the summer carnival, which serve as this well-structured memoir’s symbolic poles. As “a good girl, programmed into perfection mode,” she instinctively avoided the “sin and debauchery” that the carnival seemed to represent. Instead, she found comfort in the discipline of the church of her “grandfatherly God.” However, she became troubled by this strict division between body and spirit when she entered adulthood. As a teenager, she wore tight skirts and tried to attract male attention. She took her failure at romance as proof that she actually had a religious vocation, although friends and family tried to dissuade her. Once inside the convent, she found that the regulations were stringent: One should never criticize or question nor pursue any sort of individuality. “Convent rules whittled away my personality,” Grossman writes. She endured five years as Sister Greta before a chance viewing of the 1965 movie The Sound of Music convinced her there was life outside the church. The day she left, June 23, 1966, marks both the beginning of her new life and her book’s midpoint. The memoir’s latter half may be less compelling than the hothouse atmosphere of her Catholic formation, but its lyrical descriptions and excellent re-created dialogue, based on contemporaneous journals, enliven the story. The author caught up on everything she missed, attending feminist discussion groups, seeing risqué films—and resuming dating. Before long, she was engaged to an Alabama journalist who bought them both luxurious clothes and an extended European honeymoon. “Self-indulgence was a novelty,” she admits, but their lavish lifestyle masked fundamental incompatibility. A Chicago teaching career and single parenthood might not have been what Grossman always envisioned, but she now gracefully accepts the course her life has taken: “We were not a storybook family, but a dear family nonetheless.”
An absorbing, unpredictable life story inside and outside the church.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-95672-5
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Gretchen Grossman
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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