An engrossing coming-of-age story that wrings hard-won wisdom from giddy romance.
In her memoir, Scolnik recounts a passionate affair, tested by separation, with a Frenchman.
Scolnik’s narrative begins in 1976 when the 20-year-old Wesleyan student arrived in Paris for a junior year abroad to study flute, French literature, Marxist “Dialectic Thought,” etc. Entranced by Parisian culture but feeling lonely and adrift, she signed up with the amateur chorus of the Orchestre de Paris, where, scanning the bass section, she beheld Luc, an “Adonis-like man” with “a sensitive face radiating quiet intelligence.” After days of gazing, she finally tapped him on the shoulder. Through awkward small talk, car rides, and cafe meetups with the reserved tax lawyer, the two bonded over classical music and succumbed to a torrent of love, sex that felt “deeply metaphysical,” and languorous idylls in her garret. Alas, their love seemed doomed. Luc was married with a 3-year-old son, but, he assured Scolnik, he was separated from his wife, Claire (much of the time, at least), and would divorce her and go to America to work, perhaps. Returning to New England and Wesleyan, Scolnik continued to hope, encouraged by Luc’s besotted letters and a three-week reprise of the affair during her spring break trip to Paris. When Luc announced that he would come to Boston for a summer English course, she rented them an apartment to live in together—and that’s when her blazing ardor got plunged into an ice bath. Luc arrived grumpy and distracted, hated every morsel of American food, and made plain his indifference to Scolnik, even scoffing at her when she badly cut herself. After five days of this treatment, Scolnik “despised him with every cell in [her] body” and left him. She then rushed back a few weeks later to see him—only to be confronted by Claire herself.
Scolnik’s saga is, in part, a burning love letter to Paris, written with gorgeous detail. In cafes, she writes, she “began to recognize certain types—elderly French ladies sitting shoulder to shoulder looking out onto the street, their miniature terriers perched on chairs beside them; businessmen in suits nursing tall beers; students smoking cigarettes and writing notes at their espresso-cluttered tables; graying, long-haired intellectuals with scarves, looking important, retired, and committed to café life as a means of keeping the old political discussions alive over their plats du jour.” Concerning her fraught relationship with Luc, she conveys the visceral impact of the couple’s attraction (“it was like touching a power line,” she writes, when her finger accidentally grazed his hand during a concert), while its obsessiveness comes through in excerpts from Luc’s hammy but heartfelt missives. (“My body was knotted, as if, at 1:30 when your plane took off, all the existential anguish that you knew how to appease, surprised me again with more force, more tenacity. Paris seems absurd.”) Scolnik’s shrewd, evocative prose captures the bliss of love, but she’s also entertainingly cleareyed about its petty agonies when it unravels. (“Although I knew that none of our daily trials were my fault, Luc made me feel responsible for them all: that the bus ride into Cambridge was long and hot, that good art films weren’t showing at the right times, that a dead fish was floating in the Boston Harbor, that inexpensive little bistros weren’t materializing when we were hungry.”) The result is a captivating remembrance that treats falling in love and falling out of it with equal honesty.
An engrossing coming-of-age story that wrings hard-won wisdom from giddy romance.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64663-471-2
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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