by Larissa Pham ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2021
A vital playlist that hits all the right notes; readers will reach the end ready to hit repeat.
In this debut memoir, a writer and artist examines love and all of its complications through the lenses of art, literature, and her own life.
In her first full-length work of nonfiction, Pham, an inaugural Yi Dae Up fellowship recipient from the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat, thoughtfully collects a series of essays exploring themes of love, beauty, pain, trauma, art, and identity. Over the course of 11 pieces, Pham writes and rewrites her own story using her most honest memories alongside the lives and works of other artists and writers she admires. In "Blue,” she uses the writing of Rebecca Solnit, the artwork of Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin, and the beauty and allure of the American Southwest to narrate her professional burnout. In “Body of Work,” Pham interrogates the idea of pain—physical manifestations, potential for beauty, and increasing commodification—by analyzing Nan Goldin’s photography, the popularity of Tumblr, her tumultuous relationship with a high school boyfriend, and her subsequent sexual (mis)adventures. “I worry that in writing this down, I’m showing you the ways I made myself abject,” she confesses. “But it was useful before, and I’ve never liked the self-help books where the writer comes across as holier than thou, already healed and already recovered. I want to honor the girl I was, whose pain was real. It’s her I write for, too.” While each of the essays twists and turns from subject to subject, all of the material serves a purpose. Each curve in the collection leads readers to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of Pham’s unique perspective. In a manner reminiscent of contemporaries Leslie Jamison and Jia Tolentino, Pham seamlessly blends the personal and the cultural, the confessional and the critical, the cerebral and the sentimental, to create an exciting and imaginative memoir.
A vital playlist that hits all the right notes; readers will reach the end ready to hit repeat.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64622-026-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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by Jennette McCurdy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2022
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
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The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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