A brutally honest light shone on dark depths.
A memoir soaked in divorce, alcoholism, failed suicide attempts, but also hope.
Growing up in North Dakota, Minnesota and Portland, Ore., the author is the second of five children. Shy and sensitive, she cowers in school, terrified of drawing attention to herself. She’s ashamed of her family’s grinding poverty and fearful of her abusive, alcoholic father. Contrasted with this grim existence are Loehr’s wonderfully rendered reminisces of weeklong summer visits to her grandparents, where she picks raspberries, buys penny candy and plays dress up with “Grandma’s old dresses and hats and purses and high heels.” But life at home grows more chaotic when her father abandons the family for another woman and refuses to pay child support. While her mother works, attempting to support a family of six, the author, then 14, and her sister sneak out and get drunk. At 18, Loehr gets pregnant, fails at attempts to abort her own baby and resigns to marry Dane, the baby’s father. The next few years include having two more children and trying to keep a shaky marriage together with her abusive, alcoholic husband while riding a financial roller coaster of great success followed by crashing bankruptcy. Loehr drinks heavily and grows increasingly unhappy. Dane leaves her, and she finds herself incapacitated, lost in a maelstrom of wrenching depression, exhaustion and even a hospital stay with a team of doctors trying to cure her. At rock bottom, she concocts a list of ways to commit suicide: She tries to overdose on pills but is rushed to the hospital; next, she tries to electrocute herself but fails. The third attempt, with a gun, leaves her severely maimed. But at this point, she gains the will to live. From there, it’s a gutsy walk down an agonizing road marked by physical recovery and, through AA, a spiritual recovery. What follows is well-described personal success, years of sobriety, a true sense of self, and finally, deservedly, the ability to reflect upon and marvel at her accomplishments. The narrative flows smoothly, but there are times when complicated situations seem to beg for more sophisticated writing. However, much of the book’s appeal lies in its simplicity, and many of its stronger moments are those captured with clear, simple sensory details: “The memory scent of color crayons and old hymnals washes over me,” she writes. Her total, awful desperation is captured here, alive but fortunately caged in the past.
A brutally honest light shone on dark depths.Pub Date: June 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475227598
Page Count: 150
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
