As this personal essay veers toward polemic, its humorless author seems a little too proud of his bravery at voicing the...
What purports to be an unflinchingly, devastatingly honest look at the author’s marriage—and the institution of American marriage in general—instead reveals its layers of deceit, even self-deception.
There must be some domestic discord in the air. Thematically, this memoir by writing professor and literary essayist Ponteri shares much with the recent Judd Apatow film, This is 40, in which the director cast his wife and daughters in a marital comedy drawn from their real life, a movie that even those who found it often funny considered dark and edgy, often uncomfortable. “The phrase married man suggests a man who cannot love other women, a man doomed to loneliness,” writes the author, who confesses “the best sex I’ve ever had is in my head.” And his head is where this memoir necessarily unfolds, as he combines every woman he desires in the way he no longer does his wife into the singular Frannie, “a composite. Frannie is every girl my wife is not. Frannie is the other woman I draw into my fantasy world, every woman to which I masturbate, every woman I ogle.” Frannie is also the focus of a manuscript to which the author devoted “90 minutes a day, five days a week, all this time spent exploring our marriage separate from my wife,” a manuscript found by his wife. She understandably felt betrayed, yet did the author really betray her with a woman who didn’t exist? Even as it explores the layers of truth that are possible within a memoir and the inventions and distortions of memory on which it depends, the writing suffers when it moves from the author’s marriage to marriage itself, the “tight, toxic silence around marriage” that results in “not only our personal failures at marriage but our culture’s collective failure at marriage, the failure of an institution.”
As this personal essay veers toward polemic, its humorless author seems a little too proud of his bravery at voicing the unspeakable, shattering the taboo.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0983850489
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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
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
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