A compact, often affecting collection of autobiographical essays about family and responsibility.
In this volume of essays, a woman looks back on her past and family.
Owyang has led a tumultuous life. Born in Nanjing as the Japanese were invading the Chinese city, the author fled as an infant with her parents to the Philippines, where her father’s position as a diplomat won them asylum. When the Japanese invaded the Philippines a few years later, Owyang’s father was captured and executed. After the war, the author’s talent at the piano landed her, at age 11, a spot in the Juilliard Preparatory Division, and she settled with her mother and brother in New York City. She gave up the piano after her marriage and raised two sons with her husband, Gilbert. The essays in this collection are written mostly from the perspective of her later years, as a grandmother and retiree, meditating on the shape of her life. For example, the title essay follows a return trip to her native Nanjing in her 60s to teach an English-language course. The trek was a strange exercise in belonging and not belonging: “The locals scanned me with their eyes; some spoke to me in Chinese, trying to detect the origin of my accent. But even in a place where I looked more like the people around me, I felt like an outsider.” Several of the essays deal with her mother, an idiosyncratic woman who in her later years loved to gamble and cut her own hair. In this second edition, Owyang’s prose is measured and insightful, as here where she discusses the lack of self-determination she felt when she was young: “I remembered the dutiful periods of accommodation in my youth, the number of times I had to wait until I got old enough to wear makeup, date boys….To make waiting easier during the early years, I used to imagine my mother wrapping me in a cloak of high expectations.” The essays are well crafted and are accompanied by a number of photographs of the author’s family. The book is short and will be of greatest interest to Owyang’s grandchildren—it is to them that it seems to be directed—but many readers will likely see something of themselves in the author’s moving experiences.
A compact, often affecting collection of autobiographical essays about family and responsibility.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-941066-49-2
Page Count: 118
Publisher: Wordrunner Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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