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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
