A touchingly personal memoir of a young woman facing a grave illness.
Cramer-Miller offers a memoir about living with kidney failure.
In her nonfiction debut, the author tells a story straight out of every healthy young person's worst nightmares: When she was in her early 20s, Cramer-Miller noticed a strange puffiness around her eyes, and in short order she learned her kidneys were damaged and leaking protein. Suddenly, her personal concerns and budding career were put on hold as she found herself facing a fight for her very life. At first, she had a typical disbelieving reaction to it all: “It doesn’t make sense,” she thought at the time. “I eat healthy, I’m not into drugs—I even floss. Sometimes.” Before her confusion abated, she was subjected to a barrage of medical tests involving needles, gels, scans, and condescending doctors (“The surgeon strutted in with great bravado”). It was the start of an essentially new life. “Every story begins with a domino moment that starts a chain of events,” Cramer-Miller writes. “My first domino had fallen.” She had some advantages, including good medical care and the unflagging support of her parents (“I knew if their big dose of love could have eradicated my ailment,” she writes, “it would have”). The author encountered all of the customary trials of long-term medical care, from endless paperwork to the irritations of having no privacy in a shared hospital room (“She shouted on the phone about her family issues,” Cramer-Miller writes about one roommate, “involving meth addiction, extramarital affairs, drunken brawls, and prison”).
This is very conventional narrative territory, and the material will be familiar to readers of illness memoirs of any kind. There are the expected emotional ups and downs, heartfelt moments, and wince-inducing gruesome medical details: “When Dr. Brown explained a surgeon would connect an artery in my left forearm to a vein, it made me cringe,” the author writes. “Eventually, this connection would enlarge the vein so it could accommodate obnoxious-sized needles.” But Cramer-Miller’s chronicle generally transcends these predictable aspects of the genre by virtue of her energetic, well-observed prose (“Then I waited alone in an uncomfortable wooden chair propped against the wall and focused on the vinyl wallpaper and tiles—a study in beige on beige”) and the doggedly upbeat tone indicated by her book’s title. Her account of her journey through illness and healing is unfailingly entertaining despite the grim subject matter. The author’s path will be familiar to her fellow kidney patients, including the rigors of dialysis, the lead-up to receiving a transplant, and the aftermath of the surgery (“The first thing I said through the fog of my medication stupor was, ‘Nobody told me it would hurt!’ ”). These elements are freshened by the theme of personal development Cramer-Miller weaves throughout the narrative, vividly portraying how processing dire illness led to genuinely positive new insights about her life. This unforced sincerity is the keynote of the book.
A touchingly personal memoir of a young woman facing a grave illness.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781647425272
Page Count: 360
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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