A powerful and heartrending story of personal recovery.
A memoir of an author’s traumatic teenage years and its effect on her adulthood.
As a teenager in Denver, debut author Gelt outwardly appeared to have an idyllic life. Her father was a prominent, respected attorney, her mother managed the household and hosted social gatherings, and the family appear to have had few financial concerns. However, the author experienced a series of terrible events over a short period of time, which she recounts in this book in harrowing detail. She describes a teacher who betrayed her trust with an assault, her own suicide attempt, and a violent rape at gunpoint. She also describes the impact that her mother’s deteriorating mental health and father’s coldness had on the family. The book’s power lies in the author’s skill at clearly relating life-changing occurrences; for instance, she describes how her suicide attempt changed her perspective on the world: “I woke each day in a world that I had determined to never wake in again.” Gelt also expertly uses accounts of her interactions with other people to highlight what she felt was missing in her own life. At one point, she tells of how she ran away from home and was briefly being taken in by an acquaintance and his family, which made her realize how unloved and out of place she felt in her own household: “I longed for the safety of the familiar but didn’t desire home.” She later feels a similar bond with her first husband, Jack, and his family; she notes this feeling as the reason why she kept Jack’s last name after they divorced. Gelt also memorably describes how her mother’s mental illness overshadowed her own struggles: “her suffering was a jealous child.” Ultimately, the author compellingly shows how she found the strength to persevere and confront her own mental health challenges.
A powerful and heartrending story of personal recovery.Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8263-6063-2
Page Count: 280
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fast-paced and boisterously readable assemblage of true stories.
A memoir offers vignettes from an entire lifetime.
In his latest work of nonfiction, Binder looks back on his life and renders several incidents and themes in a series of autobiographical stories. The author has led a picaresque life, with many adventures and crises, and he’s inserted many of these escapades into the entertaining, touching, and often enlightening tales arranged in these pages. He takes readers back to his childhood, painting affectionate portraits of the many people who influenced him while he was growing up. Binder includes a particularly memorable remembrance of his mother, who was felled by a serious stroke that robbed her of her speech (“Visiting her in the human warehouse they call a hospital, I’d point to letters of the alphabet printed on a card and she would blink to spell the word she wanted to convey”). He also gives readers a captivating, behind-the-scenes look at the famous child evangelist Marjoe Gortner. Binder worked on the crew that produced the Academy Award–winning 1972 documentary about Gortner’s illusion-dispelling revival tour, in which he exposed the deceits of his childhood ministry. The author watched all of this up close and relates it with enthusiasm and sympathy. (Sometimes a touch too much sympathy, since at one point even Binder seems convinced by the enthusiasm of the crowd: “I don’t believe in magic, nor do I believe in God, but I do believe in miracles. I witnessed one.”) Whether he’s recalling partying with Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson in Las Brisas, Texas, or recounting the fracas he and his partner got into in 1966 at the Albany Convention Center when Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was speaking (“Reporters grabbed at our feet trying to trip us up and bring us down. They failed. I was exhilarated”), the author has clearly told most of these tales many times in his life. These written versions are fine-tuned to perfection and provide a large and constantly moving banquet of intriguing moments.
A fast-paced and boisterously readable assemblage of true stories.Pub Date: March 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9998695-5-0
Page Count: 363
Publisher: F-Stop Books
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A hauntingly honest and revealing memoir.
A survivor’s account of the seductiveness of an “everyday cult.”
This book is part memoir, part warning. Buglion, a cult-awareness consultant, devotes her debut book to her experience with a group she renames the “Center for Transformational Learning.” It initially appeared benignly therapeutic, she says, with its focus on “the work,” which “included a lot of longing, learning about myself, and a whole lot of idealizing,” and its use of Jungian psychology in the apparent service of healing and growth. Specifically, the author sets out to refute the notion that the methods of cults are always easy to spot. The style of the book itself demonstrates how slowly warning signs appear, and when Buglion reveals an experience with the cult’s more overt methods of control—an incident involving strangling—it’s genuinely shocking. The author takes care to explain how, even after experiencing such red flags, she remained so invested in the group. One thread about her own house-cleaning business, and the influence that the cult had on it, illustrates how cultists taught her not to trust her instincts—until a frightening discovery awakened her to the necessity of doing so. She also speaks about the ill effects of her membership on her family relationships, as when she missed her own brother’s funeral to attend a cult retreat. The book’s searing honesty does a service for cult survivors, and will also be informative to those who don’t understand how thin the line can be between a benign organization and a dangerous one; the most telltale sign of the latter, Buglion points out, is that you can never graduate from it. She also provides a thorough examination of the stages of cult participation, from “Falling” and “Drifting” to eventually “Snapping” out of its control, and, with luck, “Waking up Again and Again.” Near the end, the book becomes somewhat polemical in its discussion of cults’ authoritarianism, but it still provides good insights into how such control works.
A hauntingly honest and revealing memoir.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-57-869055-8
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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