A uniquely talented writer and performer offers up an unexpectedly uncommon approach to autobiographical writing.
Tough times spur a popular stand-up comedian and actor to dive deep into her own inimitable psyche.
In Slate’s (Marcel the Shell With Shoes On: Things About Me, 2011) intriguing inner world, raindrops are “wet water bloops” that fall unexpectedly from the sky, and brassieres are “cotton cup bags” that respectable ladies are obliged to don before heading out to dinner. The use of deconstructed language allows the author to move beyond the banal and replace it with something that more closely approximates her singular experience of being alive. Whether joyous or sad, Slate’s personal journey hasn’t always been lighthearted. Indeed, the author feels moved to describe herself as “dying” on multiple occasions throughout her life. She is concerned with many other things, as well, including the nature of lovelorn ghosts and the ethereal goodness of dogs. Underneath the gauzy, shimmering scaffolding, however, is an all-too-universal story about heartbreak, depression, and a failed marriage: “One man was gone from my life just about the time that another man pig-snorted his way into the presidency….I didn’t know how or why to give myself small pleasures.” Through it all, she has found solace in a circle of good friends and the redemptive powers of a neat house and an incredible garden. Slate seems to fit so comfortably inside the poetic realms of her impressive imagination that she has no need to abandon them, not even when she is rebuking the pernicious ugliness of male patriarchy, another element that has heavily impacted her life. In one particularly powerful interlude, the author achieves biblical grandeur, envisioning herself ripping out the ancient evil root and stem. “I take one last good look at that poison pod and I just go ahead and fling it,” she writes. “I fling that pod back into the gloomy section of outer space that is for bad gods with sickly and sour spirits.”
A uniquely talented writer and performer offers up an unexpectedly uncommon approach to autobiographical writing.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-48534-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2019
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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