An earnest and heartfelt memoir cloaked under a battle-toughened exterior.
A gender nonconforming cultural impresario recalls a life marked by drugs, displacement, a mentally ill mother, and rare but cherished pockets of solace.
Nothing about Wright’s three-decade life has come easy, as this eventful if narratively loose memoir has it, including her own birth—her mother endured more than 35 hours of labor and needed to be ferried through a crowd of homeless men in her scruffy East Village neighborhood. Wright’s mother, Rhonna, was a head-turning model and dancer, and Wright followed in her footsteps as a child actress. Stability was endlessly elusive: Wright’s parents split early, Rhonna was booted from their public-housing apartment, and she was prone to angry, overprotective rages when it came to her daughter. The term “daughter” is complicated as well. Though she was born a girl, Wright decided to “become a boy” when she was 6 and eventually dispensed with gender distinctions entirely. Externally, this created a host of anxieties regarding classmates and the boys and girls to which the author was attracted. Internally, Wright was a roiling sea, getting kicked out of various schools and slipping into drug-soaked jags of self-loathing. For all that struggle, though, rhetorically, the author puts on a brave face throughout the memoir, writing with a street-wise cool even when she discusses turning her mom in to the child welfare authorities or discovering her father’s heroin habit. "The foundation of my personality is the dance of regaining my balance from slamming into rules,” writes the author—which is why she’s not much for delivering familiar lectures about gender identity or surviving a tough childhood. It’s unclear how this engagingly reckless soul found the poise to launch a publishing, acting, and writing career; she just seemed to be doing it by her late teens. If Wright can pull it off, there’s hope for just about everybody.
An earnest and heartfelt memoir cloaked under a battle-toughened exterior.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-236820-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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