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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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