A brutally honest, affecting memoir of family resilience.
In her debut memoir, former entrepreneur and catastrophic claims adjuster Atwell chronicles the challenges of helping an adult child with disabilities transition to independent living.
Atwell and her husband, John, were celebrating the independence of (and their independence from) Lindsey—who had recently graduated from high school, was employed, and lived in a cottage in their backyard—when Lindsey breathlessly announced that she’d had sex with Gabe, a developmentally disabled friend. Much to their relief, the encounter did not result in pregnancy, and Lindsey elected to undergo a tubal ligation, a decision that both relieved and disturbed Atwell, who mourned the grandchildren she would never have. The next indication of trouble came when Lindsey accepted a second job at a pizzeria, which seemed never to have any customers, owned by Emmett, a twice-divorced former pastor whom Atwell found creepy. Lindsey quit her full-time job and moved in with Emmett. Lindsey grew increasingly distant from her family, both geographically and emotionally. Emmett insisted the Atwells were prejudiced against him and ignored their concerns about his controlling behavior and lies about his past. After several years, frequent moves, and a period of homelessness, Lindsey finally returned to her parents. Eventually, Lindsey achieved a new level of independence, and she and Atwell reached a hard-earned truce in their strained relationship. Atwell frankly addresses the difficulties inherent in dealing with the sexuality of a special needs child. Told in flashbacks, she doesn’t focus on her journey to diagnosis, but begins when Lindsey is already an adult, illustrating that acceptance of a child’s special needs is an ongoing process. Some aspects of the account may make the reader cringe, such as Lindsey’s attempts at seduction. Lindsey’s story drives home the fact that legal adulthood begins at 18, regardless of maturity level, which hampered the Atwells’ efforts to rescue her from her bad relationship. Atwell’s evocative descriptions provide added depth to the characters, particularly Lindsey, whose voice emanates from the pages. The text is occasionally repetitive, but it doesn’t detract from the overall quality of the writing.
A brutally honest, affecting memoir of family resilience.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-280-2
Page Count: 325
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
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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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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