A bare-bones narrative of a brash girl growing up in Los Angeles in the turbulent 1960s, determined to overcome her father's painful neglect. Novelist Ciment (The Law of Falling Bodies, 1993) looks back on her adolescence without pity and without judgment. She recounts years spent breaking into cars and houses, shoplifting, forging, and cutting school in a dry, deadpan tone that suits L.A.'s desert atmosphere. She, her mother, and her three brothers eke out a precarious living when her mother forces her emotionally and financially stingy father to leave. This bad girl who can barely spell has only one real interest—art. Despite a 30-year age difference, she becomes infatuated with Arnold, her married art teacher. (Curiously, Ciment never comments on the possibility that she may be searching for a father figure.) Seventeen in 1970, and desperate to escape L.A., Ciment scrapes up money to move to New York City. After posing nude at a sleazy ``modeling agency,'' she is overwhelmed by loneliness that sends her reeling back home, where she and Arnold consummate their affair and start living together. She gets into art school on the strength of her portfolio and a friend's willingness to take the SAT for her. Flash forward to 1986: Ciment (now a writer) and Arnold are living in New York when she receives a letter from her father—his first overture in years. The two guardedly reconcile, and she visits him in the hospital. When he dies soon after, she seems to grieve, not for him, but for what might have been, had he been a better father. This flawed but compelling memoir lacks a deeper level of introspection and a fuller sense of the Ciment family, but the author is a triumphantly self-made woman and her book gives us the agony—and intermittent joy—of the process in tough, spare, convincing language. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-517-70171-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
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