An exploration of the guilt and anger associated with breaking out of a box fashioned by years of abuse.
In her memoir, Mayfield (Acting A to Z, 2007, etc.) describes the hurt, longing and anger she experienced while excavating years of emotional abuse endured at the hands of her parents. The poem, written by Mayfield, that opens the book encapsulates the author’s struggle best: “It’s been many years now / That I’ve been in the box of daughter— / I’ve worked a lot on the box, / Making holes to see out / … I’ve pushed and pushed at the walls for years and years, / Trying to make the box fit me better, / But it’s a very strong box.” For Mayfield, the strength of the guilt and responsibility associated with being a daughter trapped her, even following the death of her parents. Her father, the son of a minister, was extremely lonely, living a solitary life disconnected from his wife and relying heavily on Mayfield. Her mother, a model citizen who was always helping others, was insatiable in her need for attention and enacted a reign of terror in the household. Mayfield’s discovery of her true self through daunting psychological work is a long process that she explains by describing the methods of therapy, thought, writing and reading that led her to understand the impetus of many of her issues and to improve her outlook and health. The flashbacks in the book, though clumsily called attention to with the use of present tense, are heartbreaking. One specific flashback recounts her mother’s cruel use of power to frighten Mayfield and her friends during her seventh birthday party. Mayfield’s memoir is a testament to the merit of psychological healing through the understanding and expression of feelings and allowing the past trauma of the psyche to come to the forefront to be acknowledged. Full of stark realities of abuse but also the hopefulness of healing, Mayfield’s memoir provides helpful insight to those facing similar struggles.
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1936447435
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Maine Authors Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2011
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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