A sometimes-repetitious but usefully detailed account of one man’s emotional development.
Davis divides significant life events and relationships into multiple “lifetimes” to show the steppingstones of his journey to self-love and fulfillment.
This debut memoir is split into sections based on a discrete section of the author’s story. Each “lifetime” features a short summary of events, followed by a “lifetime perspective” in which Davis highlights specific lessons he learned during that time. The first lifetime section recounts his adolescence up to his father’s death in 1970, and tells how this era was “defined by conditional love,” particularly in his relationship with his dad. His second lifetime encompasses his first marriage, which lasted 23 years. In his third lifetime, he married his second wife, Kathy, and learned the meaning of unconditional love before Kathy abruptly died of cancer. In what he calls “Lifetime 3.5,” Davis grieved Kathy and found closure in a meditation workshop that he attended at the Monroe Institute in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia in 2017, where he had a spiritual encounter that reassured him that Kathy was okay and following her own path in the afterlife. In his fourth and current lifetime, he began to embrace loving himself. The book’s standardized format of summarized accounts and commentary makes some of the text feel repetitive. For example, in the account of his second lifetime, Davis mentions the “higher self” and “spiritual journeys” that led him to “higher consciousness”; then, in the commentary, he unnecessarily reiterates that it “brought me to a critical turning point in my consciousness journey when I took my huge step into seeking personal and spiritual growth.” However, the book contains other features that work well to vary the reading experience, including additional writings, such as poems, love letters that he wrote to Kathy and she to him, and drawings or photos at the end of every chapter, which makes the content feel more relatable and tangible. One highly effective example is when Davis talks about a 10th wedding anniversary portrait that he and Kathryn commissioned.
A sometimes-repetitious but usefully detailed account of one man’s emotional development.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-950385-70-6
Page Count: 305
Publisher: W. Brand Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A raw but uneven narrative capturing Gen Z anxiety, though sometimes undermined by its attention-seeking impulses.
Young actor’s path from troubled youth to ascending Hollywood success.
In his provocative debut memoir, the emerging star behind memorable turns in The White Lotus and Euphoria delivers an engaging if somewhat disjointed portrait of coming-of-age trauma and Hollywood ambition. Gage vividly recounts his chaotic San Diego childhood—divorced parents, substance abuse, and a harrowing stint at a brutal rehab facility—with the kind of unflinching detail that will resonate powerfully with young adult readers navigating similar struggles. His voice feels most authentic when excavating family dysfunction and internal turmoil, capturing the emotional extremes and disconnection that define so much of adolescent experience. The memoir’s second half, chronicling his move to Los Angeles and emergence as an actor while grappling with his expanding sexual awareness and subsequent romantic relationships, feels less focused. Here, Gage’s self-aware attention-seeking—the book’s driving conceit—tips toward performative navel-gazing. His eventual borderline personality disorder diagnosis provides some clarity: “After my BPD diagnosis, I thought I’d discovered some profound epiphany about who I was and why I did the things that I did….I could finally see the patterns I’d been blind to before. Every relationship, the same cycle. Too fast, too deep, too reckless.” While Gage succeeds in chronicling the messy realities of mental health, addiction, and queer identity with refreshing honesty, his tendency toward calculated vulnerability can feel manufactured. The memoir works best as a snapshot of a particular generational moment—one in which therapy, social media, and celebrity culture collide in ways both illuminating and exhausting. Despite its inconsistent execution, Gage proves himself an effective and often entertaining storyteller, offering genuine insight into the psychological mechanics of family connection, fame seeking, and self-destruction that will resonate particularly with younger readers seeking meaning amid the noise.
A raw but uneven narrative capturing Gen Z anxiety, though sometimes undermined by its attention-seeking impulses.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781668080078
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
An intimate, stirring chronicle.
A daughter’s memories.
Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne’er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become “the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit” of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother’s demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titled The God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of “obscenity and corrupting public morality.” Arundhati sets her life in the context of India’s roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior.” Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter’s life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. “I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her.” Without her, “I didn’t make sense to myself anymore.” Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love.
An intimate, stirring chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668094716
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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