An unusually creative memoir of a bicultural life.
An “ordinary girl” rebels against her unstable life in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach until military service helps her gain a life-altering self-confidence.
Growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico, Díaz (editor: 15 Views of Miami, 2014) tossed aside the blonde-haired Barbie dolls her elders gave her. “They always made me feel ugly, the brown kid who would never look like her white mother,” she writes in her inventive debut memoir. It didn’t help that her philandering father sold drugs, her mother showed alarming signs of her soon-to-be-diagnosed schizophrenia, and only her loving grandmother provided a stable presence in her life and those of her two siblings. Hoping for better, her father moved the family to Miami Beach when Díaz was in elementary school. But the money ran out, and the family was evicted repeatedly from shabby apartments. As “a closeted queer girl in a homophobic place,” the author couldn’t adjust, kept getting arrested, and ended up in Narcotics Anonymous and a juvenile detention center. Depressed and desperate to end the free fall, she dropped out of high school at 16, married at 17, and made a life-changing move at 18, enlisting in the U.S. Navy. As she aced military tests, her faith in herself grew and led eventually to a graduate degree and a literary career that has earned her two Pushcart Prizes. Using flashbacks, shifts in tense, and other novelistic devices, Díaz weaves impressionistic vignettes about Puerto Rican history and culture into her story, which begins when she watches an activist’s funeral procession in Puerto Rico in 1985 and ends after a recent visit to the island in the wake of Hurricane María. Along the way, she withholds key dates and other facts that would have made it easier to put some events in context. However, the literary bells and whistles give her story a broader interest than many memoirs that are more solipsistic. This book isn’t just about the author’s quest for self-determination; it’s also about Puerto Rico’s.
An unusually creative memoir of a bicultural life.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-913-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Of the many words written about Jacqueline Kennedy, these are among the best.
Evocative memoir of guarding First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy through the young and sparkling years of the Kennedy presidency and the dark days following the assassination.
Secret Service Special Agent Hill had not looked forward to guarding Mrs. Kennedy. The action was with the president. But duty trumped preference, and he first met a young and pregnant soon-to-be First Lady in November 1960. For the next four years Hill would seldom leave her side. Theirs would be an odd relationship of always-proper formality combined with deep intimacy crafted through close proximity and mutual trust and respect. Hill was soon captivated, as was the rest of the world, by Mrs. Kennedy’s beauty and grace, but he saw beyond such glamour a woman of fierce intelligence and determination—to raise her children as normally as possible, to serve the president and country, to preserve for herself a playful love of life. Hill became a part of the privileged and vigorous life that went with being a Kennedy, and in which Jacqueline held her own. He traveled the world with her, marveling at the adulation she received, but he also shared the quiet, offstage times with her: sneaking a cigarette in the back of a limousine, becoming her unwilling and inept tennis partner. When the bullet ripped into the president’s brain with Hill not five feet away, he remained with her, through the public and private mourning, “when the laughter and hope had been washed away.” Soon after, both would go on with their lives, but Hill would never stop loving Mrs. Kennedy and never stop feeling he could have done more to save the president. With clear and honest prose free of salaciousness and gossip, Hill (ably assisted by McCubbin) evokes not only a personality both beautiful and brilliant, poised and playful, but also a time when the White House was filled with youth and promise.
Of the many words written about Jacqueline Kennedy, these are among the best.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4844-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A vibrant, encouraging depiction of a sinister disorder.
A British novelist turns to autobiography to report the manifold symptoms and management of his debilitating disease, depression.
Clever author Haig (The Humans, 2013, etc.) writes brief, episodic vignettes, not of a tranquil life but of an existence of unbearable, unsustainable melancholy. Throughout his story, presented in bits frequently less than a page long (e.g., “Things you think during your 1,000th panic attack”), the author considers phases he describes in turn as Falling, Landing, Rising, Living, and, finally, simply Being with spells of depression. Haig lists markers of his unseen disease, including adolescent angst, pain, continual dread, inability to speak, hypochondria, and insomnia. He describes his frequent panic attacks and near-constant anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure. Haig also assesses the efficacy of neuroscience, yoga, St. John’s wort, exercise, pharmaceuticals, silence, talking, walking, running, staying put, and working up the courage to do even the most seemingly mundane of tasks, like visiting the village store. Best for the author were reading, writing, and the frequent dispensing of kindnesses and love. He acknowledges particularly his debt to his then-girlfriend, now-wife. After nearly 15 years, Haig is doing better. He appreciates being alive and savors the miracle of existence. His writing is infectious though sometimes facile—and grammarians may be upset with the writer’s occasional confusion of the nominative and objective cases of personal pronouns. Less tidy and more eclectic than William Styron’s equally brief, iconic Darkness Visible, Haig’s book provides unobjectionable advice that will offer some help and succor to those who experience depression and other related illnesses. For families and friends of the afflicted, Haig’s book, like Styron’s, will provide understanding and support.
A vibrant, encouraging depiction of a sinister disorder.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-312872-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
SEEN & HEARD
Readers Donate Depression Book After Star Suicide
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