An irreverent, candidly introspective exploration of toiling with loneliness that will leave readers feeling not so alone.
One woman’s quest for companionship in a culture progressively geared toward isolation.
In her first book, about dealing with one’s own solitude, Moore—the Onion writer, former sex and relationships editor at Cosmopolitan, and creator of the comedy show Tinder Live!—doesn’t compile reams of statistics, comparative studies, or clinical evidence. Rather, she takes readers on a playful ride through her life, examining relationships and nonrelationships alike as she both actively engaged in and passively avoided assuaging that aching search for friendship and love. Swinging from the euphoria of newfound friendship to the despairing trenches of love lost, each chapter becomes a foray into universally themed experiences for women of all ages and sexual persuasions—e.g., “Please Just Be a Good Person So I Can Finally Be Someone Who Has Friends,” which details the adolescent exploits with her friends and the confusion of teen gender roles and intimacy between girls. In “I Liked Dating You Better in My Head,” Moore explores a long-term romance with a man that ended up unraveling into a textbook co-dependency in which the couple was in love with future possibilities rather than the empty reality of now. Moore’s fast-clip wit, hilarious allegories, and conversational prose knock down the uncomfortably sharp edges of facing aloneness. Comparing her own life to scientist Harry Harlow’s monkey love experiments, Moore teases, “I have always identified with the kind-of-dying monkeys who technically had food, but desperately wished they had softness and care too.” Later, in a brief manifesto of women’s romantic needs, she asks, “why did we stop wanting dinner and a movie and maybe flowers?....When did we start thinking that courtship was too time-consuming and everything romantic comedies waxed on about was just a dumb fairy-tale concept, instead of our expectations for romantic love? I’m tired of pretending I’m cool with whatevs. I’m tired of pretending that laziness can replace thoughtfulness and still be acceptable to me.”
An irreverent, candidly introspective exploration of toiling with loneliness that will leave readers feeling not so alone.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7883-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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