A whiny, snarky memoir of “the muddy field of unhappiness and constant discomfort.”
A Canadian writer tells the story of how she grew into a malcontented adult.
Korson grew up in 1970s suburban Montreal feeling inadequate. While her family was only middle-class, her next-door neighbors could afford a live-in maid and all the dolls their daughter could ever want. Korson’s perpetually crabby mother refused to buy her those dolls, and her makeup-wearing businessman father went to work sporting a look “somewhere between European porn director and Jewish buckaroo.” Korson started kindergarten at a French-speaking school where she struck up an alliance with an equally unhappy 6-year-old “dead ringer…for Walter Matthau.” Ever on the lookout for fellow misfits, she befriended a troublemaking girl at summer camp and nearly got kicked out for bad behavior. In high school, theater provided her a temporary respite from the “bullshit” of life. Korson spent the rest of the time mooning over an on-again, off-again relationship that allowed her to indulge in her penchant for “sadness and negativity.” After graduating from college, she found a job at a talent agency, where she was reminded of her “stupidity, incompetence and general dislikability.” The author also eventually met the “quasi-Deadhead sporto part-time vegetarian/alcoholic” who would become her husband after years of makeups and breakups. During the years she worried about making “crazy” babies and how she would die, she finally reached middle age. It was then that Korson learned she suffered from chronic low-level depression. Though only the “gluten intolerance of mental disorders,” her diagnosis helped her realize why she could never find joy in her life and why she was like a disease “to be managed” rather than a person in need of serious attitude adjustment. Though rich in descriptive detail, Korson's attempts at humor implode under the weight of her unrelenting negativity.
A whiny, snarky memoir of “the muddy field of unhappiness and constant discomfort.”Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4026-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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
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