by Keith Gessen ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2022
A warm, candid parenting memoir.
The early years of fatherhood recounted with humility.
Journalist, editor, and translator Gessen, co-founder of the journal n+1, gathers essays—previously published in the New Yorker and other publications—about fathering his firstborn son, Raffi, and finding his own identity as a parent. Beginning with the process of arranging for his son’s home birth, the author chronicles nervousness, anxiety, fears, and worries, some that he realizes are common to all new parents, some that seemed to beset him in particular. Parenting manuals often spout contradictory views on care, feeding, and discipline. The effect of bilingualism on language acquisition, for example, is one issue about which experts often differ. Having come to the U.S. when he was 6, Moscow-born Gessen couldn’t decide whether to teach Raffi Russian: “the language of childhood, the language of love for children, the language in which my parents and grandmothers had spoken to me.” Finally, he made an effort to do so, resulting in Raffi’s being able to understand some Russian but not to speak it. Choosing a school was a challenge. Among a few nearby schools, demographics varied, and after touring the schools, Gessen and his family—which now included a second son—moved to the school zone they thought, or at least hoped, would be best for Raffi. Most vexing was Raffi’s behavior: He was given to violent outbursts, tantrums, and aggression toward other children. Gessen and his wife tried all manner of intervention and responses, none of which worked. “My biggest flaw as a parent was inconsistency,” he admits. “I wanted to be nice; I wanted to be empathetic; I wanted to be American.” Often he ended up erupting in anger, afraid that “by blowing my top too often, by not controlling my emotions,” he was modeling the behavior he so desperately wanted Raffi to stop. From being a “three-year-old terrorist,” Raffi evolved into a “willful, sometimes violent” 4-year-old; a stubborn 5-year-old; and an “adorable, infuriating, mercurial” 6-year-old.
A warm, candid parenting memoir.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-30044-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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by Jennette McCurdy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2022
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
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The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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