Genuine, intelligent, and candid.
A 40-something stand-up comedian’s blisteringly honest and hilarious account of a life still “majorly under construction.”
As she neared the end of her 30s, Kirkman (I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales From a Happy Life Without Kids, 2013) suddenly found herself divorced. Her career was where she wanted it, and she was now “in love with [herself].” However, her failed marriage made her uncomfortably aware that her life was far from perfect. Once she realized that the libidinal lack she experienced while married had nothing to do with her hormones or undiagnosed depression, she opened herself to exploring the unknowns of adulthood. As "Jen Cougar Mellencamp,” she had a fling with a 23-year-old musician too young to remember Kurt Cobain. She also learned how to deal with her own anxieties about living alone through an attempt to set up a home alarm system that made “a creep smashing [her] window” look like less of a disaster in comparison. Kirkman came to embrace the fact that she was a renter, or, as she saw it, someone who once a month gave her money to “a nice blond lady” rather than a bank as did her married friends with mortgages. She was also able to finally admit to the liberating value of having a friendship-with-benefits relationship and of not worrying about what others thought when she stayed home on New Year’s Eve and went to bed by 9 p.m. When Kirkman broke up with the man she calls the “Ab-Master,” it was without regret for what could have been and without fear that she would find another age-appropriate partner. “I want[ed] someone to relax with…not rebuild,” she writes. Like her idol and friend, the late Joan Rivers, Kirkman offers no excuses for the freedom-loving woman she is or for her focus on building a career as a successful stand-up comic. Her life may appear chaotic and her lifestyle choices unconventional, but both are as uniquely individual as her book.
Genuine, intelligent, and candid.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7027-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
