An intelligent, hilarious, and bittersweet collection.
The TV and stage actress turns the messes of her life into fodder for this winning essay collection.
Weedman (A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body: (Tales from a Life of Cringe), 2007) describes her theatrical career as "walking around traumatized every five minutes and making a two-hour show about it." Throughout her latest book, she remains ruthlessly self-deprecating—“maybe I was the hero [of her stories], but I was so opposed to coming off as the hero that I exaggerated myself into an abusive idiot for laughs”—and consistently funny. She tells how she once imprudently moved into "a quaint little month-to-month studio that seemed artsy because it had a shared bathroom ‘like an artists' commune,’ but the place turned out to be an SRO that house[d] mostly male ex-convicts.” Of her triumphant high school years, she breezily writes, “I was just a teen with a weight problem who loved a man with chiseled cheekbones and a caustic wit. A simple midwestern gal who loved her gay choir teacher.” Other accounts—about miserable boyfriends and her meetings with her glib and caustic birth mother—elicit cringes, but they are simply landmarks that lead to the heart of the book. Weedman tones down the humor when she discusses her attempts at a lifestyle that has eluded her. She keenly feels like "a middle-aged white lady from L.A.”—no more so than when a young bartender dryly commented on how she looked "very dolled up" for what she intended to be an exciting night on the town in a new city. The author projects a mood of low-key resignation, reflecting on the spectrum of adulthood, from the 20s to the 40s, and she sneakily plants seeds of melancholy and wisdom amid the laughs.
An intelligent, hilarious, and bittersweet collection.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-218023-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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