An elucidating, caustic engagement with the author’s depression.
Having affectingly grappled with the demons that led to her mother’s suicide in Searching for Mercy Street (1994), Sexton takes on her own in this stinging chronicle of a road to three attempted suicides.
The author begins the story, and punctuates it throughout, by revisiting her mother’s mental illness. Anne Sexton, the celebrated confessional poet, came from a long line of depressives. Though she may have passed a suicide gene along to her daughter, she also did much to nurture the urge, speaking to her of the voices in her head, accusing her daughter of being the one who made her sick and being altogether too confessional when it came to lovers and sex. So Sexton fille had plenty of fuel for her own depression, which was voracious and amplified by motherhood, a grim cocktail of loneliness, grief, despair, migraines, a bipolarism that swung between gloom and agitation (no euphoric highs here) and a terrible descent from mind pain to physical pain. Sexton is a dark wizard at describing her misery, which effectively turned her into a zombie, and the impulses that drove her to start cutting herself: “It’s a way of letting the poison out. Taking control again…It makes the voice in my head shut up. To bleed is a way of knowing you’re alive.” The author provokes both scorn and sympathy, and she ably captures both the corrosive emotional storm in her head and the exhausted wariness she produces in others. Only occasionally does she overwrite—“I was ready to make music with the keyboard of my wrist”—and lose the scouring immediacy of her condition, when “[s]uicide simply came up from behind and took me in a bear hug” and she became “a mother who, as her own mother before her, had lost her grip on love.”
An elucidating, caustic engagement with the author’s depression.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58243-718-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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