A loving, lyrical, complicated portrait of a mentally ill father and the family he left behind.
A beautifully written memoir of a woman coming to terms with her father’s illness.
When McAuliffe (Theater Studies, Slavic and Eurasian Studies/Duke Univ.; My Lovely Suicides, 2007) was 20, her father died alone in a psychiatric ward, having suffered from dementia, hallucinations and a variety of presumed neurological diseases. How he reached this point, and why, as well as how the McAuliffe family coped, is the author’s subject. While serving in World War II, Bill McAuliffe was diagnosed with torticollis, an involuntary contraction of the neck muscles causing his head to twist toward his ear. After an ill-fated surgery to correct it, he began to experience signs of mental illness, which grew into long, hallucinatory and even violent weekends that overshadowed the author’s childhood. McAuliffe pulls from her father’s diary entries, letters, interviews and extensive research to bring order to her memories and to decipher what actually happened to her father. While it seems there were many culprits for her father’s lingering illness and early death—the VA hospitals, the Navy, misinformed doctors, even other family members—McAuliffe does not lapse into accusatory language; she is more interested in exploring the limitations each faced. Told in a circuitous and, at times, almost dreamlike style, her goal is to investigate her father’s past and to understand her own relationship with him and how it has shaped her life. This is not a memoir written with an audience in mind, filled with lurid details of a family in crisis; rather, it’s a thoughtful meditation that reads as though it were written for the author herself. Readers will feel privileged to share in her journey.
A loving, lyrical, complicated portrait of a mentally ill father and the family he left behind.Pub Date: March 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60938-154-7
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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