Women with eating disorders will find a lifeline to recovery in this engrossing account.
A survivor escapes the stranglehold of body dysphoria in this debut memoir/self-help book.
Holloway recounts wrenching personal experiences to convey a life-changing message to the kindred spirits she calls “ghost women.” These are women who hide behind their shame-filled compulsion to be perfect. For the author, that translated into being beyond skinny. Her recollections should help readers escape the malevolent force (“the beast”) that drove her to endure 15 years of eating disorders. Holloway’s damaged “inner child” made her a slave to her body image early on. At the age of 7, she was weighing herself and sucking in her stomach when she looked in the mirror. Her escalating desperation to “shrink” affected her mentally and physically. She didn’t attend her beloved grandfather’s funeral because she was driven to “be thin” by a looming date (“His death was inconvenient”). In her 20s, she cut 10 inches off her hair, believing that it would reduce her weight. When the numbers on the scale went up the next day, she wanted to die, a recurring theme in the absorbing book. Holloway writes with flair and creative turns of phrase. Playing the ghost woman, she writes, is “a sick form of method acting.” She skillfully details her weight battles. Her one-hour daily run stretched into a four-hour torture trail. She hung on bars in the gym to the point of exhaustion until, hands bleeding, she dropped to the floor and sobbed. Starvation alternated with binge-eating (sometimes she devoured 10,000 calories a day). The author deftly traces her torturous journey to recovery but offers hope (“Ghost Women become the destroyers of our old lives, and the creators of new ones”). The reckoning came when she started “getting fat” and she faced the horrifying reality that dieting no longer worked for her—and never would again. Out went her weapons of self-destruction: scales, measuring cups, and calorie-tracking apps. She gave herself carte blanche to eat whatever and whenever she wanted, reached a healthy weight, and has continued to live that way. Readers should find encouragement in these pages. The author delivers a valuable lesson, telling her readers that if she could put dangerous dieting behavior behind her, so can they.
Women with eating disorders will find a lifeline to recovery in this engrossing account.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5445-1719-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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