An engrossing debut memoir from 40-something Goyen, a Texas wife and mother.
Goyen opens with a brief discussion about her suffering from chronic anxiety attacks in childhood and beyond and how she learned to cope. Then, before returning to that subject, she shares thoughts and ordinary experiences that came with being a parent (or in her case, fear of never being a mother) and stories from what she describes as her family’s normal, typical middle-American life. “You might be a lot like us,” she tells her readers. The most gripping section (and the longest) describes a gradually escalating medical issue that arose when the couple thought their problems were solved. Although Goyen had a stillborn child, she and her husband finally had two sons (born 19 months apart). Their happiness felt complete. Trouble returned when the youngest, 7-year-old Blake, fell deathly ill with mysterious symptoms. For months, while they went from doctor to doctor, taking him to the hospital (sometimes to the ER) for diagnoses and treatments, their happy life became a nightmare, and their faith was tested. The author’s detailed account reads almost like a detective story about a child and his family held hostage by illness. It’s easy to empathize and care with Goyen, and her chatty, confiding, openness as a writer makes her seem like a friend. Fans of Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, 1993) will recognize and appreciate a similar sense of authorial immediacy. Goyen conveys with lyric beauty how faith in God, love for her husband and devotion to her sons now guides her response to tragedy and her approach to life. The “river” in the title refers to the family’s favorite vacation spot in Red River, New Mexico, a place that “flowed straight to my soul like a river through my heart,” but it’s easy to feel that the real river she cherishes is that of God’s love.
A child’s illness becomes the focal point for a riveting true-life drama.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484912393
Page Count: 214
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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