Sharp, courageous writing in a powerful memoir.
A woman who had her right leg amputated as a child addresses her compulsions and her relationship with her body.
In 1959, Daly was diagnosed with bone cancer—she was 8 years old. By 11, she had experienced the trauma of having her right leg and pelvis amputated. The opening of her debut memoir recounts her early years, which initially were similar to those of most children growing up in New Jersey in the 1950s. The daughter of loving parents, she recalls simple delights, such as sticking her finger in the frosting of a cake or running to the bar across the road from the family’s Hoboken apartment to call her father home for dinner and being given peanuts by the bartender. Her life changed when she began to feel terrible aches in her right leg, which were first diagnosed as growing pains before the underlying cancer was found. After being referred to an orthopedic surgeon, she endured radiation treatment, with the added anguish of watching young cancer patients die. The account goes on to address how Daly dealt with life on her journey into adulthood following the amputation. Overeating became a coping strategy for her, which developed into bulimia. She also began stealing for the “rush of excitement and power.” Her pathway toward self-acceptance became clearer when, in her 40s, she discovered a form of improvisational dance that allowed her to open communication channels between her mind, body, and spirit. The strength of this deeply moving memoir lies in its blunt honesty regarding self-perception: “I feel ashamed of wanting my distorted body to look sexy, like it’s impossible, something no one will ever think I am. Still, I hold out hope Paul will be attracted to me.” Yet coupled with her straight-talking approach, she expresses a beguiling tenderness toward readers: “I hope you find a friend in the girl I write about.” The life recalled here is punctuated with harrowing challenges, several of which appear insurmountable. But the author proves to be a true inspiration, and every sentence seems to smolder with her tenacity.
Sharp, courageous writing in a powerful memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-977815-44-6
Page Count: 410
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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