A disquieting and gripping memoir on what the author rightly calls a “taboo story”: a child’s abandonment of a parent in desperate need—here, a mother afflicted at age 48 with early-onset Alzheimer’s. A Yale-trained attorney living in Washington, D.C., Hilden portrays her mother, who was divorced when the author was a young girl, as very emotionally distant and alcoholic even before the disease took hold. Hilden felt that as her mother slipped into the terrible “death in life, this half-way state” of increasing confusion, then dementia and incontinence, she had to free herself entirely from her mother’s orbit and from any caretaking responsibilities. Recoiling from “fear and revulsion at what a body can become,” she made a complete break to create a life for herself—the author only visited her mother, after many years of separation, during the last days of her life. Hilden writes movingly about her decision’s implications for her other relationships, especially her repeated difficulties becoming close to, boyfriends (on whom she sometimes cheated). She is unblinkingly honest in analyzing herself, noting how leaving her mother and never looking back until the end was both emotionally freeing and crippling. In relationships, “I had the dubious, valuable skill of leaving,” while study and then working hard reinforced “the myth of myself as an efficient academic machine,” an often reality-based self-perception that “consoled me all my life.” Hilden never deeply probes the ethical implications of her decision, from which she maintains a certain cool, rational distance and which she unambiguously reaffirms as necessary at the book’s end. But she does write evocatively, often in short, punchy sentences, about her mother’s very difficult pre-Alzheimer’s personality, the disease’s irredeemable ugliness, and her own sometimes “ruthless” personality. While Hilden does not come across as a responsible daughter or even, much of the time, as a terribly likable person, she unquestionably is a skillful, unsparing practitioner of the art of confessional autobiography.
Pub Date: April 28, 1998
ISBN: 1-56512-185-6
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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