Harrison, a college student when her mother committed suicide in 2006, tries to make sense of the death.
Now in her mid-20s, first-time author Harrison devotes the first portion of her memoir to the 40 days between her mother’s disappearance and the discovery of her body. The remainder of the book consists of a chronicle of the author’s coping with the reality of the suicide, flashbacks to her childhood and the attempts to move forward. Harrison, who grew up in Massachusetts with two older brothers, was a child of divorce who tended to side with her mother Michele against the father who left, and who considered her mother a best friend. Michele Harrison sometimes acted emotionally, but seemed stable to Lindsay, and enjoyed her work as a special-education teacher. Shortly before her suicide, Michele signaled subtly that she might do so, but none of the children believed it would really happen. Despite the devastation, the author managed to finish her education at Brown University and attend Columbia School of the Arts. Along the way, though, she abused alcohol and pills, and even made a feeble gesture at suicide herself. Her father, an engineer who has remarried and started a second family, re-entered Lindsay's life in a constructive way after the suicide, creating a heartwarming daughter-father bond. Although the memoir is intensely personal, the sense of loss is universal. Harrison's relationships with her brothers are rendered with all the complexity that can be summoned when emotions trump deep conversation. As for the deceased, Michele seems vivid on the page, a mother who desperately loved and needed her children and cared about humanity, even as she spewed bile aimed at her departed husband. A well-written account by a youthful author who is bouncing back from grief.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1193-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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
PERSPECTIVES
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