A valuable guide to recognizing predatory behavior and surviving sexual abuse.
In this work that blends fiction and self-help advice, a psychotherapist traces the path to healing after suffering sexual abuse through the metaphor of a highly ritualized dance.
Elena and Cesar meet through the singles scene in their South Florida community. She is a newly divorced graduate student seeking a license to practice psychotherapy. He is a divorced FBI agent with a co-dependent relationship with his former wife and numerous drama-filled entanglements with ex-girlfriends. Elena is both attracted and overwhelmed by Cesar’s charm and attentive “love bombing.” His erratically possessive behavior sets off alarms immediately, and she almost ends their relationship after their first date. Increasingly wary, she calls off their romance time after time only to be lured back by Cesar’s combination of seduction and passive-aggressive behavior until it finally culminates in sexual assault. The story intersperses the development of Elena and Cesar’s thrilling and disturbing relationship with her later conversations with her therapist and a rape support group. Woven among these strands are seven tango lessons that teach Elena about the dynamic relationship of trust, control, and responsibility that develops between the leader and the follower in the passionate dance. Through therapy and dance, Elena begins to trace the roots of her trauma and the old wounds that made her vulnerable to the manipulations of a narcissistic man. The second section, titled “Psychological Insights,” ties Adamo’s own experience of rape to Elena and Cesar’s story in a more straightforward, mental health text, offering explanations and support on such topics as “Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Predatory People” and “What is Consent, Anyway?” The author’s choice to introduce her exploration of sexual abuse and narcissism with a fictionalized “case study” gives her narrative a dramatic pull, and the therapeutic chapters supply a cogent outline of “loving and leaving a narcissist.” While the arc of Elena and Cesar’s back-and-forth relationship seems agonizingly long, the metaphor of the tango provides an innovative approach to recovering from a toxic relationship and wresting strength and autonomy out of hopelessness and shame.
A valuable guide to recognizing predatory behavior and surviving sexual abuse. (glossary, resources, references, author bio)Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72731-273-7
Page Count: 232
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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
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