A candid but bumpy account of a woman’s search for happiness.
A divorced mother explores the dating scene and herself in this debut memoir.
Binns, a 33-year-old clairvoyant, left her husband of 12 years after feeling invisible. In her book, she describes the dizzying succession of high-drama relationships that followed, from which she protected her 2-year-old son, Shane. Bouncing between overlapping men, the author assessed each one with sarcasm, self-doubt, and more than a little prickliness. (“What cave had he crawled out of?” she wondered when asked to explain her clairvoyance training.) She recalls alternately love-bombing and punishing her dithering partners, asking them to remember her birthday, then removing all traces of them in her life—then checking to see if they noticed. Binns begged for attention, then ignored phone calls; forgave—or rather, overlooked—traits that later repulsed her; and ascribed motivations to men without discussion. The author recounts that her writing and painting, moments with her son, and the occasional true intimacy—sometimes with Vietnam veteran Steve—provided some joy. She eventually shed her insecurity and alienation, confronted her memories of her parents’ terrible fights, endured two deaths, and found meaning in being a mother. In her wide-ranging memoir, Binns’ writing style is both canny and witty. She delivers acerbic comments about her own behavior (“It made me queasy to think of sex as payment, but it wasn’t as if I wasn’t getting anything out of that”). But her self-loathing and insatiable approval-seeking eventually become a bit oppressive. Self-obsessed (“He did not love me enough to…love himself”), hypersensitive to rejection, and quickly immersed in liaisons, she would find fault and tear up mementos while hiding her anger. Such morbid loneliness and interpersonal myopia bred contradictions. “How dare he judge me?” she asked about a man questioning her having an affair while she was married. Yet she considered another man’s extramarital turmoil “laughable.” She also discusses her so-called friends, who “tuned into my life for their weekly entertainment.” In these pages, the author genuinely relates her suffering and how she safeguarded her son’s welfare, and the book ends strongly on a ray of hope. But many readers will likely find it difficult to follow Binns’ painful journey.
A candid but bumpy account of a woman’s search for happiness.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-433-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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