A smart, empowering work about self-discovery that features strong prose and intriguing takes on self-help strategies.
In this memoir, entrepreneur and public speaker Pollak (Soul Proprietor, 2001, etc.) recounts the dissolution of her marriage and the subsequent realizations that changed her life.
The 70-year-old author grew up in White Plains, New York, a wealthy suburb of New York City. As an adult, she spent years reflecting on how she “should have been happy” but never truly was. She says that her critical mother instilled in her a sense of codependency and a need to please that would haunt Pollak throughout her adult life, particularly in her 37-year marriage. However, she says that her husband, Ben, a dynamic, beloved teacher at an elite school, was a moody, distant figure at home, thwarting her desire to create the perfect vision of a happy family. In this memoir, she narrates the slow deterioration of their marriage, writing about the “parallel lives” they led after their children were grown. Along the way, the book shifts back and forth in time, as she tells of her attempts to gain self-understanding and regain a sense of self-worth. The most compelling parts of the book detail Pollak’s toxic friendships, especially one with a woman whom she came to see as a stand-in for her own mother. The author’s obsession eventually led her to join a program for people in unhealthy relationships. Her interpretation of relationships in a 12-step frame offers a refreshing change from other addiction narratives. However, Pollak relies too heavily on the language of self-help and pop psychology; early on, for instance, she identifies herself and her family members through the lens of self-help author John Bradshaw: “my older sister (the Scapegoat in Bradshaw’s model).” Her memoir is at its best when she puts forth her own voice, effectively synthesizing complex feelings into powerful, revealing phrases: “Intimacy once removed was delicious,” she writes regarding codependency. “Too close, and it felt like a burden.” It’s also inspiring when Pollak narrates her decision to move away from the suburbs after her divorce so that she could become the Manhattanite that she always wanted to be.
A smart, empowering work about self-discovery that features strong prose and intriguing takes on self-help strategies.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-527-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2019
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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