An engrossing, sympathetic exploration of living with hoarder parents.
Actress and writer Miller chronicles her father's obsessive need to collect things.
"Every night before I went to sleep…[I asked] for the things I wanted most in life: new dolls, a best friend, and for my house to burn down," writes the author in this gripping, graphic re-telling of her childhood growing up with a father obsessed with hoarding. A fire would destroy the rats, fleas, piles of junk, newspapers, clothes, cracked picture frames, broken radios and unopened boxes of stuff that filled every square inch of their house. When fire did break out and all was lost, including Miller's pets, she felt nothing but guilt (her pets weren't supposed to die), which quickly turned to anger as their new house soon became consumed by her father's relentless need to collect. She was unable to invite friends over since, within a few years, the new place "started to resemble the remnants at the bottom of a garbage can." A broken boiler and broken pipes created a soggy mess of the entire house, where only one of three bathrooms worked and, then, only intermittently. "The downstairs had become a relative swamp ground…the inches of trash would squish beneath our feet, creating an unsteady terrain,” writes Miller, and the house was filled with "floor-to-ceiling piles of boxes and bags of paper and knickknacks, things that had been purchased and put down and long forgotten." Despite all the filth, Miller knew her parents were "doting, fallible people that gave me everything they had, and a whole lot more." Eventually, Miller was able to place a name on her father's condition and slowly learned that it was OK to let close friends know about the situations she'd endured.
An engrossing, sympathetic exploration of living with hoarder parents.Pub Date: July 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-02583-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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
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