An intense, moving account of raising and mourning a child with mental illness.
In her debut memoir, Meadows memorializes her daughter while deploring the state of adolescent mental health care.
Karen and Dennis were ecstatic to adopt infant Sadie. She grew into an outgoing, adventurous child who embraced life, whether that meant fishing with her grandfather or starting a neighborhood dog-washing business. But bouts of crying, anxiety, and overeating became regular occurrences in Sadie’s life when she started middle school, and a psychiatrist eventually diagnosed her with dysthymia, a chronic depressive disorder. Medication failed to help Sadie, and she made her first suicide attempt in seventh grade. A short stay in a psychiatric ward was followed by more attempts and a longer stay in a residential facility. The family moved to Portland, Oregon, where Sadie’s new psychiatrist prescribed an ever changing drug cocktail as Sadie joined the city’s street culture and began skipping school, avoiding home, and admitting herself to the ER. The Meadowses eventually found what they hoped was a true solution: several months of treatment in a wilderness program followed by over a year in a rural emotional-growth high school. Sadie’s stability issues continued in Portland, however, and at age 18, she died after a suicide attempt. Meadows emphasizes that the tragedy of Sadie’s situation was not just her illness, but how her illness obscured a vivacious and complete human being. She writes compellingly about the constant obstacles facing Sadie, herself, and Dennis: a dearth of child and adolescent psychiatrists, lack of “wrap-around” services, and, perhaps most significantly, the stigma that prevents families from seeking help or comfort. The book’s power comes from the way Meadows lucidly analyzes her own story to identify larger systematic issues in mental health care for young people. The memoir also includes basic advice and resources for struggling teens and their families.
An intense, moving account of raising and mourning a child with mental illness.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-137-9
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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
