A sharp, innovative text.
A distinguished essayist, poet, and professor reflects on a life lived in a female body.
In this memoir in essays, Wade (English/Florida International Univ.; When I Was Straight, 2014, etc.) meditates on her lifelong fascination with words, language, and the body. She opens with a piece that establishes herself as a body living in “a constellation of bodies” called a family. Wade depicts herself as a girl who loved the beauty of actresses like Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe but whose own body did not fit the conventional mold of feminine desirability. Like a scientist, she wrote about the imperfect bodies of those around her in journal entries that looked like “inventories” rather than personal reflections. In the second essay, the author examines the differences that sometimes made her feel like a “monster in your own closet.” An only child who took comfort in an imaginary sister/friend, Wade developed secret affections for two females: a female teacher and a camp counselor. At the same time, she writes, “I have also failed to love someone I was expected to love—my first boyfriend.” In the third and fourth essays, the author remembers adolescence as a time of growing awareness about the consequences of being female in a patriarchal society. While her parents warned her about the dangers of sex, she learned how to engage in heterosexual courting rituals that would lead to marriage and motherhood. Yet at the all-girls Catholic schools she attended that taught her to appreciate everything from religious difference (she was Protestant) to the “‘poetry [of] math,” she also learned about the power women had to be autonomous beings. In the fifth section, Wade intermingles episodes from her early life with those that tell the story of her final, joyful acceptance of the lesbianism she had suppressed with a witty series of quasi-mathematical equations and philosophical propositions. Intelligent and lyrical, the narrative mingles often comic musings on female embodiment with insightful observations about the meaning of love and self-acceptance.
A sharp, innovative text.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5567-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in...
Legendary performance artist Abramovic unveils her story in this highly anticipated memoir.
When she was growing up, the author lived in an environment of privilege in Yugoslavia, which was on the verge of ruin. Her parents, two fervent communist partisans and loyal officers during Josip Broz Tito’s rule, were not the warmest people. Abramovic was put under the care of several people, only to be taken in by her grandmother. “I felt displaced and I probably thought that if I walked, it meant I would have to go away again somewhere,” she writes. Ultimately, she carried this feeling of displacement throughout most, if not all, of her career. Many remember The Artist Is Present, her 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during which she sat in front of museumgoers for 736 hours, but her work started long before then. As a woman who almost single-handedly launched female performance art, the author has spent the better part of her life studying the different ways in which the body functions in time and space. She pushed herself to explore her body’s limits and her mind’s boundaries (“I [have] put myself in so much pain that I no longer [feel] any pain”). For example, she stood in front of a bow and arrow aimed at her heart with her romantic and performance partner of 12 years, Ulay. She was also one of the first people to walk along the Great Wall of China, a project she conceived when secluded in aboriginal Australia. While the author’s writing could use some polishing, the voice that seeps through the text is hypnotizing, and readers will have a hard time putting the book down and will seek out further information about her work.
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in anticipation of what she is concocting for her next tour de force.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90504-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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