A deeply felt story of a woman’s eventful life on society’s margins in 1970s and ’80s America.
Pseudonymous author Mitchell shares reflections on her tumultuous teenage years in this debut memoir.
The author writes that she discovered that she was pregnant in 1974, just a few months after her boyfriend—the baby’s father—had moved across the country with his family, from Minnesota to Arizona. She was 16, and when she refused to get an abortion, she says, her parents kicked her out of the house and she ended up in a foster home. She got a job as a nanny; gave birth to a daughter, whom she put up for adoption; graduated high school; and started taking college classes at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. There, she met an ex-felon, married him, and briefly attended the Women’s Army Corps boot camp before following her new spouse to Alaska. The marriage quickly fell apart, which began a period of travel for the author that would take her around the United States and as far away as Colombia and Tunis, working as a fishing hand, a drug runner, a journalism student, and a sex worker. She did much of it while grappling with epileptic seizures and self-destructive behavior. In recounting it all, Mitchell effectively highlights her wryly philosophical disposition: “It’s nice to think that there is a universal power adoringly watching us face challenges, giving gentle guidance, knowing what lessons we each must learn for some reason,” she writes. “But probably it’s just random. Us on a rocky planet. Stars and debris colliding, causing reverberations….” The events of the book leap around in time, allowing Mitchell to portray the sense of dislocation that she felt during her travels and experiences. However, the story always returns to her years in Seattle, showing how she got to know herself through sex work while fearing possible threat of the local Green River Killer. It’s the stuff of Beat Generation novels—a raw and revealing story.
A deeply felt story of a woman’s eventful life on society’s margins in 1970s and ’80s America.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2023
ISBN: 9798372845749
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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