A sensitive chronicle of sadness.
A daughter bears witness to her mother’s pain.
Memoirist, poet, and novelist Bialosky unfurls her mother’s life from the time of her death, in 2020, to her birth in 1933, creating an affecting family history of loss and grief. Iris Bialosky was living in a skilled nursing home residence when she died, suffering from dementia. Because she had been diagnosed with depression and anxiety throughout her life, it took years to finally identify her final affliction. For the author and her sisters, the diagnosis was not surprising. “In one way or another,” she reflected at the time, “it feels as if we sisters have tried to hold our mother together for most of our lives.” Their father died of a heart attack at the age of 30, when the girls were barely toddlers, leaving Iris a single parent, overwhelmed with responsibility for her children and consumed with grief. As the author grew up, she was well aware that her home life was far different from that of her friends. Her mother “never asks to see my grades. She doesn’t iron or wash my clothes. She rarely has food in the fridge. I am afraid to ask her for anything. All of us are.” Iris’ husband’s death was not the only cause of her recurring depression, the “dark tentacles” that invaded her. Iris’ mother had died when she was 9, leaving her father in constant mourning and her longing for her mother’s love. As a young widow, Iris hoped to remarry; her short-lived joy from a second marriage—and a fourth daughter—ended in a bitter divorce and, later, that daughter’s death by suicide. Unspooling the events of her mother’s life, Bialosky reveals, has helped her to understand both the parent who at times seemed so remote and her own place in her family’s fraught history.
A sensitive chronicle of sadness.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781451677928
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Washington Square Press/Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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