Introspective and rich with personal revelation.
In her debut memoir, Mayfield (co-author: Ellie Hart Goes to Work, 2005, etc.) mines her 1960s rural Kentucky childhood as the daughter of a charismatic, alcoholic father who earned his living as an undertaker.
"The first time I touched a dead person," writes the author, "I was too short to reach into the casket." Her father lifted her up so she could get closer to the lifeless body, an experience she recalls as a "thrilling...unthinkable act." This dark and sharply detailed memoir follows the activities that took place in the author's Jubilee, Kentucky, girlhood home, which also served as the Mayfield and Son Funeral Home. There, she and her family members were cast as "the ghosts of the house," even as dead bodies came and went. She learned when to be quiet, out of respect for the deceased, and the rituals involved in preparing a corpse for burial. She was also preoccupied with obsessive thoughts about what objects the dead were buried with until, at last, she concluded that the most significant thing they possessed were their secrets. To that end, Mayfield offers up the long-held unspoken truths about her own family. This includes the darker side of her father, who served as his daughter's protector and hero while simultaneously battling his own demons of alcohol and infidelity. The author also explores the underbelly of their small, segregated town, which included suicide and violence and the ensuing familial feuds and grieving. Eventually, as she entered adolescence, Mayfield turned away from idolizing her father. Instead of adhering to the same parameters she had always followed, she longed to be free from the stifling world of the dead in order to live her own life—in this case, in London, where she lives with her British husband.
Introspective and rich with personal revelation.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1476757285
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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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