An unrelenting, authentic, literary midnight confession.
A sometimes-scandalous poet opens up about herself and her business.
Mary Karr describes writing a memoir as “knocking yourself out with your own fist.” In these short, autobiographical pieces, poet and novelist Addonizio (The Palace of Illusions: Stories, 2014, etc.) knocks herself out over and over, sometimes viciously. The book is filled with her usual jaunty wit, sarcasm, and irreverence. This “Emily Dickinson with a strap-on,” as she calls herself, is ruthlessly honest and writes so well that no matter what she’s excoriating or dissing or musing about becomes immediately fascinating. Her passion for writing is an “irresistible lover” she’s known most of her life; it’s the “monster that controls me.” There are also the lovers she has sought in all the wrong places her whole life—the divorces and many lovers or mere sex partners for a night. Too many had “no heart in their chest cavity.” Many of these pieces are dark and unrelenting in self-flagellation. There’s the drinking (a lot), depression, and a drug-riddled life: “pot, mescaline, acid, Quaaludes, Seconals, coke, heroin, speed,” and others she can’t recall. Addonizio writes fondly of her famous parents. Her sportswriter dad read to her often, and her piece about taking her elderly, ailing, once-a-champion-tennis-player mom, Pauline Betz, to a drug store for a flu shot is tender and loving. Poetry and writing and her daughter, Aya Cash, an accomplished actress, are the true loves in her life. Addonizio has managed to live off her books, grants, prizes, and readings her whole life. Trying to write a third novel to make some money was as painful as “having a baby,” and she gives up. Whether it’s walking around drunk at a poetry conference or looking for a new beau online, the life of this poet is not a pretty picture, but it’s captivating.
An unrelenting, authentic, literary midnight confession.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-312846-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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