A book of pluck, spirit, and great emotion with an appealing perspective on the value of each human life.
A poet and creative nonfiction professor grapples with motherhood and the meaning of life in this memoir of raising her developmentally challenged daughter, Fiona.
As Lanier notes at the beginning, she had followed all the best-practices advice throughout her pregnancy—organic fruits and vegetables, no GMO, maintaining a seated position leaning forward with “my elbows propped on my spread knees like I was forever on the verge of imparting a proverb”—to make certain that hers would be a “SuperBaby.” But Fiona was born with the extremely rare Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, which has profound developmental affects relative to mental growth, speech, coordination, and other areas. It has a high youthful mortality rate, and “there is no specific treatment.” The author struggled mightily to cope with the severity of the diagnosis: “I was free-falling….My sadness was no longer the selfish reaction that my baby wasn’t, would not be perfect, but that we could lose her….My cry was an emptying….My cry was a collapse.” Lanier writes with powerful humanity as she charts her course, and one of the first lessons she learned was that when anyone chooses to have a child, they “sign up for the fragility of life.” The author is especially sharp on her journey to remake herself, to pivot away from “the desperate, clinging, distraught version who wanted what her child was not.” Along the way, she forcefully condemns the concept of a hierarchy of lives worth living. Her abiding love for Fiona is clear throughout, and it’s heartening to watch her learn to reject the idea that disability is deficit. “We can only open our arms, say welcome,” she writes, and she is clear that this means being vulnerable, “often fallible, but always open, and raw, and real. And present to the whole messy world.”
A book of pluck, spirit, and great emotion with an appealing perspective on the value of each human life.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-55963-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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