Inventive, jaggedly lyrical and disturbing.
A poet’s anguished memoir about her struggles with schizophrenia and alcoholism.
Morgan grew up in a handsome family in which “Dad look[ed] like Burt Reynolds, Mom like Elizabeth Taylor.” But trouble brewed just beneath the surface. Work kept her father away from home while alcohol kept Morgan’s mother distant from her daughters. Through a series of chronologically ordered vignettes, Morgan reveals how emotional dysfunction, mental illness, and alcohol and drug abuse fractured her family. In her early teenage years, the author experienced hallucinations that included visits from people she called “the Suits.” At age 15, she overdosed on a cocktail of pills so that she could join them. For a time, alcohol helped still the voices “from the other realities;” then Morgan became addicted and eventually dropped out of college. Meanwhile, her middle sister battled on and off with drug addiction while her younger sister sank irretrievably into both substance abuse and mental illness. Morgan continued to be in and out of mental institutions for psychotic breaks that doctors believed were manifestations of dissociative identity disorder. A correct diagnosis of schizophrenia, along with the medication that helped her manage her illness, did not come until she was able to get over her own fear of telling the truth about her condition. Yet through all the personal turmoil—which also included coming to terms with her own bisexuality and watching her mother die of alcoholism—Morgan learned how to cope with her alcoholism, finish college and harness a powerful imagination to write poetry and earn an MFA. Liberated from fear and filled with love for a God, who “sen[t] sparrows” that let her “forget about the mud,” she found a peace that was all the more meaningful for its fragility.
Inventive, jaggedly lyrical and disturbing.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61649-460-5
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Hazelden
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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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