A quirky book that unfortunately does not help further the dialogue about the difficult experience of coming out.
A series of essays that document the difficult task of self-acceptance.
After years without a relationship or a stable sexual preference, former BuzzFeed editor Heaney (Dear Emma, 2016, etc.) decided to take matters into her own hands and go at the same speed as her feelings—frantically, somewhat aimlessly—toward the uncertain question that loomed over her head: am I gay? It started with a feeling of displacement. “This world,” she writes, “in its forceful femaleness, was something that greatly appealed to me. I did not feel a part of it, but I found myself longing to be.” Then the author discovered The L Word, an all-female TV show centered around the lives of gay women. Quickly, Heaney’s desire increased. While in graduate school at the University of Minnesota, Heaney had her first girl crush, which ultimately opened the doors of her desire and allowed her to feel something real for another woman. The author organizes the book in essays, or extended moments, punctuated by brief memos in which she describes various interactions with women throughout her life. Though Heaney provides a singular look at the experience of coming out, the essays often feel predictable. For example: “I was fascinated by lesbians being lesbians and talking about lesbians, to a degree that didn’t seem fitting for someone who now identified as one herself.” Sometimes, Heaney seems to be living according to a guidebook of expectations of what lesbians are supposed to feel, act like, and talk about, based on a society that more often than not limits their liberties. Furthermore, the author’s voice, though relatable, is too frequently self-congratulatory. She discusses her previous memoir, Never Have I Ever (2014), so many times that readers might lose interest in wanting to read it.
A quirky book that unfortunately does not help further the dialogue about the difficult experience of coming out.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-18095-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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