Generous and illuminating.
Horatio Alger meets Dorothy Allison in this debut memoir about growing up and coming out.
The author’s father, a fundamentalist minister, died during the boy’s eighth birthday party. The family had always been dirt-poor, and now his mother had to find a way to scrape by on her own. Jennings loved reading, and whenever life in his North Carolina trailer park got him down, he escaped into books. But school was a trial: He was chubby, too smart for his own good—and attracted to other boys. A scholarship to Harvard got him out of the rural South into classrooms and dorms where it was okay to be brainy and, at least in the more progressive corners of Cambridge, okay to be gay. But Jennings’s awakening didn’t end in Harvard Square. The most affecting passages here describe his experiences teaching at elite private schools in New England. His students adored him, but administrators got nervous when Jennings wanted to speak publicly about his sexual orientation. This subtle but unequivocal discrimination eventually led him to found the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which works to make schools safe for gay students. Jennings describes the evangelical, racist South in which he grew up, without a trace of condescension. His mother emerges as a heroic, working-class feminist: fighting to keep food on the table, she eventually became the first woman in the Winston-Salem area to break through the glass ceiling at McDonald’s and be promoted to manager. When Jennings came out to her, she was initially perplexed and upset. But seeing that her diffidence was driving a wedge between them, she founded a gay parents’ support group. This memoir, which ends with Jennings delivering the eulogy at his mom’s funeral, would make any mother proud.
Generous and illuminating.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-8070-7146-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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