An emotionally raw account of a personal healing journey.
A school trauma leads to overindulgence in comfort food, dieting, overwork, and an eventual mental health crisis in this memoir.
In middle school, Bartleson experienced such vicious bullying that it damaged her self-image for the next two decades. The opening lines set the tone of her journey from pain and self-hate to recovery: “The first time I noticed my weight was in fourth grade.” A group of the most popular girls in her class rejected her request to join them in a sidewalk game, shaking their heads “no” and “snickering.” Things got worse in seventh grade, when her friend’s boyfriend apparently made it his mission to harass her daily, calling her a “fat pig,” a “whale,” and other names. By the time she entered high school, she was consumed by feelings of inadequacy: “Instead of confronting these emotions, I pushed them down further and further, donning a mask, and becoming who I assumed other people—my parents, perhaps—wanted me to be: an overachiever.” In her 20s, after repeated attempts at dieting, she embarked on a weight-loss program she’d considered several years earlier, tracking her progress on Instagram and her laurenliveshealthy blog. Bartleson’s eloquent memoir meticulously documents the subsequent years, during which she became focused on healthy eating, marathon running, blogging, and maintaining her full-time marketing job, all while being treated for an autoimmune disorder. Her commitment to detail results in some riveting sections, such as moment-to-moment descriptions of terror and exuberance during the Alcatraz Challenge—an arduous 1.5-mile swim from the island followed by a 7-mile run across the Golden Gate Bridge. At other times, though, this tendency becomes exhausting, as when she takes almost three pages to precisely describe how she prepares her morning decaf expresso. Nonetheless, the narrative offers a solid document of bullying, its aftermath, and recovery from trauma.
An emotionally raw account of a personal healing journey.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2022
ISBN: 9798885045742
Page Count: 292
Publisher: New Degree Press
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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