An intimate and moving account that also makes a rigorous call for change.
In this memoir, journalist Hight examines the life of his troubled brother and how society fails the mentally ill.
For more than a decade, the author conducted research and pored over the many documents left behind by his older sibling, Paul, who was shot by police in 2000. “For my brother,” Hight writes, “the battles of the mind were constant.” Hight begins his account with Paul’s childhood in the 1940s in Guthrie, Oklahoma. (Hight himself was born in 1958.) A tragic accident resulting in the death of Paul’s sister, Linda, led the family to become even more devout Catholics, and Paul set his sights on becoming “the perfect priest.” Against the backdrop of ’60s social unrest and the Catholic Church’s Vatican II reforms, Paul managed to achieve his goal and seemed poised to become a progressive, promising priest. By 1970, however, his parishioners had begun whispering to church officials: “Something’s wrong with father.” It would take years for the term “paranoid schizophrenia” to enter the family’s vocabulary, but it was clear that Paul’s mind was deteriorating, which caused him to be declared unable to perform his duties, and he was removed from the priesthood. This would be the first but far from the last time that an institution would fail him. From there, Hight mixes his own memories with meticulous investigation to relate the narrative of Paul’s many ups and downs, his time in mental institutions, and his encounters with law enforcement, which would eventually claim his life. Hight’s considerable talents as a journalist led him to unearth fascinating details in the history of the Catholic Church, Oklahoman mental institutions, and the use of deadly force by the Oklahoma City Police Department. These findings range from intriguing debate among psychiatrists about the effects of cigarettes on mentally ill patients to starkly differing accounts of the confrontation that left his brother dead.
At times, it feels as if the book loses sight of Paul and his struggles amid all the historical context, but Hight mostly balances this tendency with affecting stories; his account of finding Paul’s disturbing writings for the first time or reconstructing his brother’s memory of a particular rainbow are just two heartbreaking examples of many. The result is a deeply personal biography with tremendous scope: Paul is just as much at the whims of public policy as he is tormented by his hallucinatory demons. Major events, including tornadoes, the Oklahoma City bombing, and other crimes, occur, and their effects leave no room for Paul’s special needs. Hight presents a practical and persuasive analysis of the ways that institutions share information, and he gets across the urgency of reducing the stigma of adult mental illness. The emotional core of the book is found in the stories of family—the only institution that didn’t fail Paul. “The perception has been ingrained into our psyche...the psychotic killer who’s less than human,” Hight writes, “For me, that person was my brother.”
An intimate and moving account that also makes a rigorous call for change.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-937054-99-1
Page Count: 356
Publisher: The RoadRunner Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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