An unremarkable double memoir.
Side-by-side versions of an evolving parent-child relationship whose ups and downs are recounted in overstatement and clichés.
First-time authors Joan, who works in the children’s entertainment business, and daughter Maddy, 22 but still growing up, give often conflicting versions of the same events. Both accounts read as though they were being told aloud to a friend. Joan’s style is effusive and her vocabulary limited; she describes her daughter as “incredibly social” and some good friends as “absolutely hilarious.” Maddy is more matter-of-fact, but just what the facts are depends on who’s telling the story. There are two versions of a grocery store candy-stealing episode when Maddy was eight (not long after her parents divorced), of her learning problems in elementary school and of a disturbing incident that began when Joan ejected Maddy and some other misbehaving children from her car, obliging them to find their way home across the city. Teenaged Maddy sabotaged her mother’s relationship with a man identified only as “Bike Guy,” and then with another, “Tree Guy.” Her educational difficulties continued, but eventually she graduated from Taddle Creek, an alternative high school with 20 students run by a man named Harvey Rainbow. More serious problems arose when Maddy was 19 and learned that the man she was dating was HIV-positive and had infected several other girls. While that episode had a happy ending, major troubles lay ahead. Assuming that her mothering days were coming to an end, Joan decided to leave Canada for southern California to start a new life alone. When her 20-year-old daughter unexpectedly came along, she found herself back in mothering mode, as Maddy made a mess of her life with drinking and drugs. Their tale ends with Joan adoring and admiring her “simply amazing” daughter and with Maddy admitting her drug use and asserting her love for her mother.
An unremarkable double memoir.Pub Date: April 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4169-1839-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
For the author’s fans.
A Fox News journalist and talk show host sets out to prove that she is not “an empty St. John suit in five-inch stiletto heels.”
The child of devout Christians, Minnesota native Carlson’s first love was music. She began playing violin at age 6 and quickly revealed that she was not only a prodigy, but also a little girl who thrived on pleasing audiences. Working with top teachers, she developed her art over the years. But by 16, Carlson began “chafing at [the] rigid, structured life” of a concert violinist–in-training and temporarily put music aside. At the urging of her mother, the high achiever set her sights on winning the Miss T.E.E.N. pageant, where she was first runner-up. College life at Stanford became yet another quest for perfection that led Carlson to admit it was “not attainable” after she earned a C in one class. At the end of her junior year and again at the urging of her mother, Carlson entered the 1989 Miss America pageant, which she would go on to win thanks to a brilliant violin performance. Dubbed the “smart Miss America,” Carlson struggled with pageant stereotypes as well as public perceptions of who she was. Being in the media spotlight every day during her reign, however, also helped her decide on a career in broadcast journalism. Yet success did not come easily. Sexual harassment dogged her, and many expressed skepticism about her abilities due to her pageant past. Even after she rose to national prominence, first as a CBS news broadcaster and then as a Fox talk show host, Carlson continued—and continues—to be labeled as “dumb or a bimbo.” Her history clearly demonstrates that she is neither. However, Carlson’s overly earnest tone, combined with her desire to show her Minnesota “niceness…in action,” as well as the existence of “abundant brain cells,” dampens the book’s impact.
For the author’s fans.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42745-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42366-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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