A disturbing but frequently riveting and illuminating read.
Beecher chronicles the ways mental illness brought chaos and heartache to her family.
Beecher and her husband, Jamie, were both members of the Portland, Maine, police department. She begins her memoir at a point of high drama. She and Jamie had been married for about 15 years and had two young kids. It was Labor Day Weekend, and Jamie was in the middle of a full-blown psychotic episode. The author describes convincing him to admit himself to the Jackson Brook Institute, a mental health facility in Portland. The moment was the culmination of years of Jamie’s building depression and anger. Now, paranoid and hallucinating, he was admitted to the hospital. Within days, a unique problem arose. Jamie was given a roommate that Beecher and Jamie had each arrested in the past! Beecher transferred Jamie to the Portsmouth Regional Hospital in New Hampshire, and less than two weeks later, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. His chemical imbalance wasn’t curable, but it was treatable, and Jamie was placed on a lithium regimen. He eventually returned to work, and Beecher remained vigilant. And thus began decades of watching, intervening, and accepting. In addition to packing the narrative with engaging work vignettes, Beecher ably depicts the difficulties of toggling between the roles of police detective and mother and spouse/caretaker. She also captures the emotional stresses first responders try to bury. “As we stoically walked away from scene after scene,” she writes, “denying a piece of what made us human, our own shapeless wounds were running up a tab.” These pages contain a wealth of information about the benefits of the drugs used to treat mental disorders—and their occasionally life-threatening side effects. Intermittent jumps back and forth in time, sans dates, can be confusing. Beecher, however, offers an articulate, vivid portrait of a harrowing journey.
A disturbing but frequently riveting and illuminating read.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8-9865910-0-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Halding Hills Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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