A thoughtful meditation on a ruthless, mysterious final act.
Why did a bright, vivacious young woman, the author’s mother, kill herself?
In 1965, when he was 4 years old, Gavron (Creative Writing/Warren Wilson Coll.; An Acre of Barren Ground, 2005, etc.) was told that his mother, Hannah, had died of a heart attack. He grew up knowing nothing more until, at the age of 16, his father revealed another story: in a friend’s apartment not far from where Sylvia Plath had lived and died, his 29-year-old mother had committed suicide after she was rejected by a lover who turned out to be homosexual. In 2005, two life-altering events—his older brother’s sudden death and his own heart attack—unleashed a desire to finally learn the truth about his mother. Like an archaeologist “conjuring a jar out of a few shards,” Gavron found fragments of elucidation in his grandfather’s diaries; his mother’s writings; and from interviews with family, friends, and even her last lover. In calm, temperate prose that belies his pain, anger, and frustration, he recounts his journey into his mother’s life and last days. Hannah had been a sexually precocious teenager who may have had an affair with the headmaster of her boarding school when she was 14. She studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, married at 18, and, with her husband’s encouragement, enrolled in college. Eight years later, already the mother of two sons, she emerged with a doctorate in sociology. Her thesis, published posthumously, was titled “The Captive Wife.” Based on interviews, Hannah argued, “some women felt trapped and depressed rather than happy and satisfied at home with their children.” She may have shared those feelings, but they were complicated by narcissism, anxiety, panic, and “sudden ‘fits of despair’ ” when things did not go her way. As he delves into his mother’s personality, Gavron astutely concludes that “no suicide is the product of only one thing,” and all have shattering consequences for survivors.
A thoughtful meditation on a ruthless, mysterious final act.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61519-338-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: The Experiment
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
PERSPECTIVES
© 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.
