A remembrance that sometimes meanders but offers great warmth and insight.
Civil engineering administrator Joy tells her story of partying and parenting with gritty honesty and humor.
This no-holds-barred memoir offers radical candor as it encompasses everything from the Virginia-born author’s childhood dreams and preoccupations to her acceptance of middle age. In thematically organized chapters, Joy recounts how she went from being a strong-minded, hard-partying girl to a single mother working for engineering firms. Her story is littered with references to her favorite songs (the music that “made” her, as the book’s subtitle note), whose titles appear, often with additional details, in regular footnotes throughout the text. Joy spent her teen years in Virginia Beach in the 1990s, drinking, taking drugs, and clubbing with close friends. Her stories of that time are mostly fun and fluffy, but she also relates how her alcohol use eventually led to increasingly unsatisfying and risky sexual encounters. The memoir details how Joy gradually moved on from this time in her life, becoming a young mother, navigating a toxic marriage and divorce, and starts a career in administrative positions at engineering firms. Joy’s voice is brassy and confessional throughout, and the book reads like an extended monologue from a braver and wilder best friend: “It doesn’t get more authentic than this, my friends,” she writes early on. The frank, often harrowing detail with which she describes sexual acts are compelling, as is her account of her anger at being exploited and treated like a disposable object by men. She also compellingly discusses her experiences with sexual assault. These stories will likely strike a chord with many female readers. As the book addresses other topics, such as exercise and office jobs, the author’s voice feels less urgent, and a more chronological structure might have helped to keep the pacing consistent. Still, Joy’s prodigious storytelling skills often shine through.
A remembrance that sometimes meanders but offers great warmth and insight.Pub Date: June 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781667878409
Page Count: 388
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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