A visceral, darkly lyrical narrative that reads with the immediacy and rawness of an open wound.
A critically acclaimed poet’s account of her anguished descent into alcoholism and self-destruction.
When Groom (Five Kingdoms, 2009, etc.) gave birth to her one and only child at 19, she was already in the fierce clutches of alcohol dependency. Through a series of impressionistic, loosely chronological recollections, the author describes the early experimentations with drinking that evolved into full-blown addiction. Shy and socially awkward, the author—who took her first drink at 14 and had the first of many blackouts a year later—saw alcohol as liquid empowerment. It was, she recalls, a “potion that chang[ed] me, [made] me unafraid.” The greater her need for alcohol became, the more out of control her life became. Groom was increasingly drawn into questionable friendships, unhealthy relationships and life-threatening situations—extreme inebriation led her to be gang-raped and almost murdered. Her pregnancy was the eye in the increasingly violent storm of her life. But soon after she gave her son to her aunt and uncle, she became overwhelmed by a profound guilt that exacerbated a propensity toward self-mutilation. After one particularly gruesome cutting episode, Groom went to a rehabilitation center. As she recovered from alcoholism, she began to struggle with the trauma of losing her son, first to adoption, then to infantile leukemia. Wracked with self-hatred, she cycled in and out of school and moved from one low-paying job to another. Eventually, she gained the courage to embark on a two-decades-long journey to learn about her son and understand why he became ill. The language of this brooding and obsessive memoir is exquisitely compressed, yet beneath the taut imagery and diction are palpable, powerful surges of emotions.
A visceral, darkly lyrical narrative that reads with the immediacy and rawness of an open wound.Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1668-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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