An emotionally saturated memoir: dynamic, moving, and colorful.
In her poignant debut memoir, entrepreneur and social activist Patterson unfolds her familial lineage of women who wrestled with marriage either through divorces or in their rejection of the institution altogether, often opting for “partnership without laws.”
As a slight-framed African-American girl who attended mostly white private schools, the author’s own coming-of-age in 1970s Manhattan was fraught with challenges. The virtual opposite of her turbulent sister Ramona, Patterson searched for her identity while navigating the 1980s world of music and style at nightclubs and in college, continually encouraged by her father to be courageous and resilient and to embrace her blackness. Adulthood forced her to choose between a career in publishing and a temporary gig at a strip club. “As sexist as stripping for money sounds,” she writes, “I was dictating my own worth.” Yet her greatest trial as a woman and a mother would arrive with the birth of her third child, Penelope, and the ensuing challenge of “living with a reality that has turned me upside down.” As a toddler, Penelope experienced a radical, unconventional “declaration of self,” telling her mother, “I am a boy.” Patterson openly shares details from those early years, which were fraught with so many strong emotions, including guilt, confusion, and fear that Penelope would be robbed of the “uncomplicated freedom” of so-called normalcy. After months of soul-searching and discussions with her extended family, who were unconditionally accepting, the author came to terms with the reality that Penelope would now be known as Penel, her son. These revelations and developments did not occur, however, without bearing the brunt of societal intolerance, cruelty, and questioning of Patterson as a mother. “The world is unkind to people it doesn’t understand—to those who don’t live by its rules,” she writes. The author’s journey of familial love and fearless motherhood will particularly resonate with parents of transgender children and anyone who has struggled to be loved or accepted.
An emotionally saturated memoir: dynamic, moving, and colorful.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-17901-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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