A poignant memoir about the years of healing that are often required after having an abortion.
How one woman overcame the traumatic experience of abortion.
Essayist Underwood, who studies at Harvard Divinity School and co-hosts the "Spiritually Blonde" podcast, was caught by surprise with her pregnancy at age 19. She always imagined being a virgin until marriage, marrying a man she loved, and having their first child a few years after the wedding. “My first pregnancy was supposed to be about joy,” she writes. However, she believed that, despite the suffering involved, she needed the abortion since the baby, a failed relationship with the father, and being in love with someone else were all the wrong things at the wrong time. Then she spent years trying to overcome the incredible sadness she felt afterward. Underwood intimately describes the events leading up to her relationship with Noah, a drug dealer and user, while the man she truly loved, “Will-B,” was in the military and overseas. She also chronicles the abortion and the tactics she used to move on. These included a Buddhist ceremony commonly used in Japan to help women move beyond abortion, a Roman Catholic retreat, a water baby ritual, meditation, consultations with a representative from Planned Parenthood, and more. Through it all, she continued to struggle with her true feelings about her relationship with Will-B, where the timing of any declarations of love was always out of sync. Underwood’s writing effectively exposes her emotional conflicts about her abortion as well as those of the many women with whom she discussed this often taboo subject. The author shines a personal light on the dilemma that women face when they have to juggle their own needs and desires with a biological accident that has the power to completely change their lives, whether they birth the child or not.
A poignant memoir about the years of healing that are often required after having an abortion.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-245863-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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