A sad memoir from a woman mired in the past.
A chronicle of obsessive grief.
Essayist Talbot (Loaded: Women and Addiction, 2007, etc.) recounts her life after her lover, Kenny, left her and their young daughter, Indie. For the next 13 years, she was unable to forgive or forget: “What we leave won’t leave us, it seems, the same way that Kenny won’t seem to leave me, even though he did long ago.” Two years after he left, she “carried all the words he had said to her through every action: every load of laundry, every page read on the couch, every stroke of mascara in the mirror, and every pouring” of a gallon of wine each night. Leaving Indie in the care of friends, Talbot entered a detox program, where a counselor advised, “You don’t have to be Hemingway to be a writer. You don’t have to drink or be sad.” Although in mourning, the author was able to function professionally, taking various short-term teaching jobs, moving with her daughter many times. At Boise State University, she called herself “The Professor of Longing,” and she includes her imaginary syllabus: “This course is about failed attempts,” she announces. “We’re not going to read anything beyond my own proclivities. We’ll discuss stories, essays, and poems that remind me of my most recent misgivings, the words underlining my past….The text in this class is me.” Unfortunately, this self-absorbed memoir also is only about Talbot; she gives no real sense of Kenny or her growing daughter, only of her own attenuated suffering. One particularly disturbing episode involves Indie: shortly after a move to Canton, New York, the fourth-grader fell ill. Vomiting and relentless diarrhea continued for several weeks before Talbot took her to a pediatrician—and then only after she herself collapsed. Carbon monoxide poisoning nearly killed them both.
A sad memoir from a woman mired in the past.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59376-615-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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