Dogged optimism about a medical crisis sometimes detracts from the power of honest recollections.
A debut memoir chronicles one woman’s experience with a rare gynecological cancer.
There are fewer than 6,000 new cases of vulvar cancer per year, making it a rarer type. In 2016, 46-year-old Torres was diagnosed with vulvar cancer—specifically, metastatic squamous cell carcinoma. She regretted not getting the painless lump looked at earlier; by now it was stage 4 and had spread to the lymph nodes in her groin. Having worked in the medical field for 10-plus years and recently completed a bachelor’s degree in health administration, this single mother knew just how serious her circumstances were. Surgery was arranged quickly, followed by five weeks of radiation and chemotherapy. Torres adopts a self-deprecating attitude that makes light of distressing situations. She was embarrassed that her daughters had to help her to the bathroom and care for her wound, but “let me tell you that when you are dealing with vulvar cancer, dignity kind of goes out the window,” she asserts. The book forthrightly documents side effects, such as a pulmonary embolism, incontinence, and balance problems. There is the occasional striking metaphor, as when her skin was “starting to resemble plastic after it has been in the microwave for too long”—and in such a sensitive area. But the author remains relentlessly positive and spiritual, especially in her transcribed social media posts, in which she frequently mentions how much cancer has taught her and how her faith has sustained her. Most pages in the book, which features black-and-white family photographs, also use an encouraging Bible verse as a kicker. The problem with relying on social media posts is that they lend themselves to camouflage: People can gloss over unflattering aspects of their lives and hide uglier feelings. As a result, Torres rarely delves below surface emotions. The injustice of losing her job after a long-term disability leave and the precariousness of her financial situation (for example, she had to start a GoFundMe page) deserve more attention, for instance. Her wedding to a man named Lyle provides a sweet conclusion, yet the book’s ending seems premature because a “cancer-free” label isn’t generally applied until year five. (A physician contributes a final informational chapter.)
Dogged optimism about a medical crisis sometimes detracts from the power of honest recollections.Pub Date: April 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973615-24-8
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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