An uneven collection in which the author shows that it’s time to move on from mom.
A mother’s monitoring becomes helpful but overwhelming as the author travels a rockier road than most toward domestic bliss.
Though labeled a collection of essays, this book reads more like a memoir and covers some of the same ground as Monroy’s previous memoir, The Marriage Act (2014). The author proceeds chronologically and follows the narrative thread of romantic and marital misadventure, but the focus remains mostly on the relationship between Monroy and her mother. The latter, referred to throughout as the “Profiler,” has distinguished herself with the State Department for her sharp instincts in dealing with visa applications, and she uses that same intuition in judging—and almost invariably rejecting—her daughter’s suitors. “At fourteen, I felt smothered by the intensity of our single mother/only daughter relationship,” writes the author, and readers can easily understand, particularly after a teenage boyfriend with whom the daughter has shared drugs runs afoul of authorities because of “a personal mission to get rid of the bad boy who captured her daughter’s affections.” But as the daughter matures into a writer in her 20s and 30s and the mother continues to overstep, the attempts to cast this as sitcom cuteness begin to seem a little unnerving, particularly as Monroy invites her mother to contribute interludes on what was wrong with her daughter’s choices in men and why. The author does seem a little deluded in her choices—e.g., she fell deeply for a vagabond who said things like, “the real art is my life,” and “I’m a professional appreciator of moments.” This followed her marriages to a gay man, to whom she gave the gift of citizenship, and a second who turned overly controlling, followed by a cohabitant poet who was both a perpetual liar and psychopathically vindictive (inspiring the book’s title). Eventually Monroy looked for direction from a reader of tarot cards, making her mother more resentful, before finding belated stability in marriage and motherhood.
An uneven collection in which the author shows that it’s time to move on from mom.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59376-649-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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