A well-reasoned and highly accessible manual for overcoming past trauma and attaining truly unlimited lives.
Former criminal defense attorney Kilcoyne, a survivor of parental abuse, offers a guide to growth and recovery.
The author writes that, as a preteen in the 1980s, she had to care for her younger siblings and mentally ill mother for years while her abusive father served time in federal prison. She presents accounts in this book that will prove difficult for many readers to endure. At one point, for instance, she tells of “the first time, but certainly not the last, I felt responsible for my mother’s survival,” when she was 8 years old and her bedridden, depressed mother pressed the muzzle of a gun to her own temple. Such moments are evenly buoyed, however, with calm explorations into the human psyche, bolstered by solid references to the works of such respected researchers and clinicians as Gabor Maté and Bessel van der Kolk. Her warm, conversational style creates an inviting space for readers to contemplate the sadness and the science of trauma. She insightfully describes the “tightly woven yarns of untruths” that cause people to get “tangled up in [their] stories.” But Kilcoyne maintains an encouraging, motivational tone throughout, and the “Let’s Sum It Up” and “Now It’s Your Turn” sections effectively complement each instructive chapter with prompts to help readers apply what they’ve learned to their own realities. She asserts that the key to healing is having the ability to forgive past transgressions. Kilcoyne refreshingly notes, however, that abusive parents must also take responsibility for their own actions. In addition, she astutely points out that feelings of shame, such as the kind she felt when she was forced to beg neighbors for grocery money, don’t fade without forgiveness. Kilcoyne tells of how her later success as a lawyer didn’t keep her from feeling terrified of being alone. “The trauma didn’t happen because we deserved it,” she writes, but she notes that this fact won’t stop one’s brain from making it seem so. Overcoming such thinking is hard work, and in this book, Kilcoyne helps to demonstrate how that’s possible.
A well-reasoned and highly accessible manual for overcoming past trauma and attaining truly unlimited lives.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781637743904
Page Count: 272
Publisher: BenBella
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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