Compellingly introspective and revealing, despite the tendency toward overwriting.
Solidly literate but gushy memoir from the actress known for her roles on Star Trek: Voyager and Orange Is the New Black.
Mulgrew recounts her rise from a bucolic Iowa upbringing to much-in-demand thespian on the New York stage to iconic TV roles on Ryan’s Hope and Voyager. The memoir immediately sets itself apart from most other actors’ life stories, as the author’s prose can occasionally be self-consciously lapidary, the overall effect of which can alternate between stuffiness and evocative elegance. Unlike the Sisyphean plight of 99 percent of aspiring actors and actresses, Mulgrew’s rise to prominence in the acting field in the 1970s seems comparatively less fraught. She studied with Stella Adler (who told her that it would “be so easy for you to take your eye off the prize and skate into Hollywood”) in New York for a short time and performed in a few amateur productions. She then strode confidently into the office of a talent agent, and the rest was history. By her early 20s, Mulgrew had assumed the high-profile role of Mary Ryan on the much-beloved TV soap Ryan’s Hope. But it was also around this time that she became pregnant with her first child; being young and wary of her burgeoning career, she gave her daughter up for adoption. It would prove to be a decision that would haunt her for years, even though she would go on to have other children. The author also plows methodically and somewhat coldly through the many romances and marriages that did not survive her busy career and mercurial lifestyle as a stage and TV actress. But while her career is reaching its peak with her portrayal of Capt. Kathryn Janeway on Voyager, she also closed an important and long chapter in her life when she was unexpectedly reunited with her adopted daughter.
Compellingly introspective and revealing, despite the tendency toward overwriting.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33431-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
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