An unflinching dispatch from the intersections of motherhood, poverty, drugs, and mental illness.
Better Call Saul meets La Leche League in this creative memoir.
In a work that veers from confessional to cautionary tale to small-town crime blotter, Baker (English/Univ. of Wisconsin-Oshkosh) offers a harrowing account of her childbearing years at the center of the Midwestern methamphetamine crisis. The author and her high school sweetheart, Ryan, returned to their Wisconsin hometown to raise a family only to find that Oshkosh had traded its overalls for opioids. Ryan scraped together an unsteady income as a public defender for the many townsfolk cursed by addiction and its attendant woes: assault, theft, murder, child endangerment, and criminal neglect. Although she portrays Ryan’s law practice as a noble ministry defending the weakest from too-severe punishments, Baker is hardly the meek pastor’s wife in this paternalistic scenario. Her only source of relief from the anguish of bipolar depression was getting high on oxytocin, the feel-good hormone released during pregnancy, breast-feeding, and near-death experiences, but she had to continue to have babies in order to keep this precious “oxy” flowing. As the children kept coming and the family’s debts piled up, they descended into the moral quagmire of the impoverished. Baker blames her failings as a mother and citizen (ignoring seat belt laws, letting her children’s front teeth rot) on her self-diagnosed addiction. Even as she compares her escapades and temporary insanity to the meth addicts all around them, she details her family’s hypocrisy in being willing to profit from, but not befriend or live among, her husband’s clientele. In order to gather the drug-addled denizens to her breast in narrative solidarity, she subsumes their tragic stories in her own and makes the disturbing anecdotes from their case histories serve as evidence for her theories about motherhood under duress. The author writes with an imaginative, studied complexity that, when joined with the disquieting subject matter, results in a memoir both evocative and irritating but which readers may find themselves unable to put down or soon forget.
An unflinching dispatch from the intersections of motherhood, poverty, drugs, and mental illness.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61519-439-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: The Experiment
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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