Feisty, funny, lightweight observations on life Southern-style.
Humorous essays from a sassy Southern gal raised in Alabama and now based in New York City.
Following her well-received book of short stories, American Housewife (2016), Ellis returns with a collection of witty essays filled with commentaries on a wide variety of aspects of her life. Though she pokes fun at the current tidying trend—sparked largely by organizing consultant and author Marie Kondo—that has people sorting through and discarding mountains of stuff, she discovers that she loves a clean house (“stepping into the Container Store for me is like stepping into a crack den”). Ellis shares her wisdom on staying happily married: “On his birthday, give him a singing card and shave above your knees….On Thanksgiving, dab a little Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup behind each ear. On Super Bowl Sunday, incorporate a giant “#1” foam finger into your lovemaking.” The author also discusses why she didn’t have children, the off-the-wall birthday parties her parents threw for her and her sister, what it’s like to fly coach while seated in the middle seat, and a host of other zany topics. Throughout, she provides commentary on what certain words and phrases mean in “Southern Lady Code”—e.g., a “vintage” book means “dog-eared, with ballpoint notes in the margins”; when discussing potential pregnancies, the phrase, “ ‘if it happens, it happens’ is Southern Lady Code for we don’t want kids.” Whether she’s out shopping for a special party outfit, swiping a trench coat, or sharing some of her own mother’s witticisms, the author’s brand of humor is subtle and mostly unforced. Her one-liners—“sex is like a funny cat video: everyone thinks theirs is special, but we’ve all fallen off a couch”—and consistently droll remarks keep the amusement factor high and the pages turning.
Feisty, funny, lightweight observations on life Southern-style.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54389-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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