A restless yet satisfying memoir that will appeal most to women who’ve found themselves fleeing hopeless relationships.
Diary entries from a woman who left her marriage and husband for a freer existence.
Chaplin’s epistolary memoir, extracted from two years of recovered emails and journals she’d kept beginning in 2006, chronicles the dramatic, adventurous, and heartbreaking story of a restless married woman who’d fallen out of love with her husband of 13 years. The author opens with frustration and resentment at her “stoner” spouse, Josh, a formerly athletic Southern California surfer who remained glued to his video games while she wrote about her unhappiness in a secret daybook “to stave off going mad.” The author found catharsis through the “calming logic of language.” Desperate to abandon the rage-filled man she’d known since she was 20, the author eventually separated from him and moved to Dublin to meet her brother, Seth, who was touring with a rock band. In Dublin, Chaplin’s single life bloomed. Excited about the new world her separation inspired, the author writes feverishly of make-out sessions in the streets and of her passionate relationship with sexy Irish lad Kieran. Yet she felt like a “husk” when Josh called, on Christmas Eve, to ask for advice on a new relationship he’d begun with another woman in Los Angeles. Though the gears of this memoir grind a bit too erratically and self-consciously at times, Chaplin voices her intimate thoughts and emotions consistently and urgently enough to capture readers’ attention as well as their sympathy when the author’s free-for-all single life begins to sour. Memories of former happiness with Josh haunted her, and a serious bout of depression followed a spontaneously messy return to Ireland in an attempt to make miracles happen with the philandering Kieran. This a breezy, compelling slice of reality, as Chaplin openly shares her trials with a “freedom and exaltation such as I’d never known, as well as darkness that threatened to bury me.”
A restless yet satisfying memoir that will appeal most to women who’ve found themselves fleeing hopeless relationships.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3499-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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