The main question is whether Noble was better served in the mental health system, or outside of it, and the answers she...
Noble’s story of living with dissociative identity disorder and of being misdiagnosed, misunderstood and adrift in society.
The author’s powerful memoir begins right from the dedication: "This book is dedicated to our much-loved daughter Aimee, the sunshine of my life, and our wonderful therapist for her footsteps in the sand." Noble isn't referring to a husband or partner with "our"—she's referring to herself. More specifically, herselves: Noble has more than 20 identified personalities, 14 of which are individually renowned artists with their own distinct styles and strengths. Throughout the book, the author switches between “our” and “my,” heightening the connection of readers to the story. Growing up, her parents struggled with their own problems, as individuals and as a couple, which added to Noble's struggle with being overlooked while she found ways to compensate for the growing discord in her head. As the difficulties of adolescence compounded her challenges, the compensations became inadequate and she found herself—the self she identified as her primary personality at the time—awaking in the hospital more frequently. But little came of the hospitalizations. As Noble began to tentatively form connections with others, she found the ground under her feet shifting constantly: Who had she met? With whom did she do this activity, or that one? Which personality was responsible for the teenage misbehaviors? These and other similar questions form the core of the narrative.
The main question is whether Noble was better served in the mental health system, or outside of it, and the answers she reaches trying to grow into adulthood and motherhood are at once jarring and deeply moving.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61374-470-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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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