A profound meditation on the overcoming of past trauma.
In this unflinchingly candid memoir, debut author Miller recounts a childhood of abuse.
When Miller was only a young child, her mother died in an automobile accident while driving drunk. Her father had divorced her mother and already moved on to another marriage, and he wanted nothing to do with Miller and her three siblings. He also withheld child support. The author moved in her with grandmother, Nana, and suffered under her often unkind authority. Her uncle Henry was an unabashed alcoholic who tyrannized the house with his mercurial bouts of insanity and anger. In one particularly upsetting scene, Henry stabs a pony to death in front of her. Miller enjoyed some respite from Henry’s madness during his frequent stays in a mental hospital. Aunt Charlotte, her mother’s oldest sister, often assumed the role of a mother figure, but she was also an incorrigible alcoholic with a predilection for brazen sexual exhibitionism and promiscuity. Miller was, by her own account, a neurotic and emotional child mercilessly targeted by bullies. Such relentless abuse eventually drove her to alcohol as a path to numbed oblivion, and she nearly died in a car accident driving while drunk, a sad echo of her mother’s death. Just as predictably, she sought comfort in the arms of abusive men, looking for self-destructive co-dependence more than authentic love. She became pregnant at 16 and reluctantly aborted the baby under pressure, a decision she always regretted. After leaving an alcoholic husband, she finally found a path to recovery and redemption through a newly discovered faith in God: “Only as my faith has grown into a deeper and more dependent relationship on God and His Son, Jesus, has my life had the most balance and peace.” This is a grim remembrance told—amazingly—without demonizing the tormentors; in fact, Miller lovingly depicts all, even the most abusive, with a forgiving sympathy. For example, she thoughtfully considers the challenges Nana must have faced when suddenly saddled—well into her 60s—with three children to raise. The theme of this inspiring autobiography—beautifully rendered by the author—seems to be the deeply therapeutic value of granting clemency to one’s abusers.
A profound meditation on the overcoming of past trauma.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4908-5281-2
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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