A raw, profane, and funny memoir.
The story of a volatile Chinese-Canadian childhood in a family beset by the “Woo-Woo” of mental illness.
Wong’s debut harrowingly portrays a family who “believed that mental illness, or any psychological disturbance, was caused by demonic possession.” She opens with her diagnosis of actual neurological impairment, migraine-associated vertigo, after she’d escaped to graduate school, “How nice to know that I was officially un-Woo, I thought, though he was diagnosing me with a lifelong disorder which left me confined to bed and frequently unable to read or write.” While appearing affluent, her extended family’s emotional entanglements created a chaotic household for Wong and her siblings. The author captures her father’s jovial cruelty in bleakly hilarious dialogue, as when he instructs her that “crying will turn you into a zombie like Mommy.” Wong’s mother also loomed ominously, refusing to receive appropriate treatment despite numerous instances of destructive rage—trying to light Wong’s foot on fire during an ill-starred family trip, noting, “it’s not like you need both feet, because you don’t move anyway.” This hallucinatory upbringing occurred within a caustically portrayed émigré community. From childhood, Wong’s ecologically damaged Vancouver suburb, where many Asian neighbors manufactured cannabis or methamphetamine in McMansions, seemed conformist, abrasive, and indifferent to criminal behavior. The author describes most characters with a visceral, grotesque sense of body horror, and she doesn’t ignore her own struggles with obesity and other maladies: “Puberty had transformed me into a four-foot-eight, 140-pound goblin.” Wong’s familial entropy culminated in her favorite aunt’s attempted public suicide, on a major bridge during Canada Day, gaining them further notoriety: “ ‘The cops said I was the best bridge jumper ever,’ Beautiful One squealed to me on the phone.” Nonetheless, the author moved toward redemption through understanding, noting of her mother, “she screamed because she was constantly afraid.” Wong confidently creates pungent dialogue and environmental detail. There are issues with pacing, in that the grim narrative progression can seem repetitive or meandering, but on the whole, this is a bracing debut.
A raw, profane, and funny memoir.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55152-736-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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