A reflective, heartfelt memoir of surviving and understanding the subtle devastations of narcissism.
A chance encounter at a Halloween party becomes the starting point for decades of reflection in Ferrell’s memoir.
The memoir opens with a moment of remembrance—the death of the author’s father in 2022—which prompts him and his wife, Maureen, to revisit the story of how they met. “Each time we explained our situation,” he writes, “we just skip over the details and tell the partial truth—that we both met at a Halloween party.” The book reveals the “whole story” behind that simple line: two young professionals in 1980s New Jersey, navigating tangled friendships, fragile egos, and manipulative personalities. What begins as a lighthearted tale of flirtation—Maureen dressed as a devil, Marcus as Dracula—gradually becomes a psychological journey of love, loss, and narcissistic abuse. The author introduces Chuck, a domineering roommate he later calls “Narcissist One,” whose controlling behavior foreshadows the deeper theme of the narrative. As Marcus and Maureen’s relationship develops, they confront the lingering trauma left by Maureen’s ex-boyfriend, Ted, a man Ferrell identifies as having “narcissistic personality disorder.” Through these episodes, the book explores how empathy and self-awareness can coexist with vulnerability: “Maureen became better at it as time and experiences went on. She did it with perseverance. With patience. With sympathy.” Ferrell’s storytelling is often conversational and deeply personal, rich with reconstructed dialogue and careful emotional observation. The pacing sometimes slows under the weight of detail, but the intimacy of his voice gives authenticity to scenes of both humor and heartbreak. Ultimately, Ferrell offers more than a nostalgic love story. His “devil’s road” through narcissism becomes a meditation on how compassion survives manipulation and how self-knowledge can transform pain into endurance.
A reflective, heartfelt memoir of surviving and understanding the subtle devastations of narcissism.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781779620354
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Tellwell
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A literary haunting that will burrow under your skin.
A genre-bending book that grapples with the diffuse and uncategorizable enormity of personal loss.
A woman wakes alone in her guest bedroom, grieving the dissolution of her marriage to an emotionally manipulative writer. A woman returns home to her apartment, spying a pool of blood creeping under the neighbor’s door. Each woman narrates one half of Lacey’s latest literary experiment, a recursive story told in two parts: a novella and a memoir entwined with one another. The effect is unsettling, like experiencing the lost memory of a book even as you turn its pages. “I felt I’d been shrunk down and shoved into a doll’s house, and I knew then—again, or for the first time—how grief expands as it constricts, how it turns a person into a toy version of herself,” Lacey writes in the opening page of the memoir section. The “toy version of herself” might be what Lacey transposes into the novella, about a woman confronting her role in the end of her marriage while growing ever more anxious about a possible murder next door. Then again, maybe not. “Ha ha, we said, yet again someone has confused the voice of a fictional character for an authorial statement of belief,” Lacey and her husband assure one another in the memoir. Across both sections of the book, Lacey offers meditations on faith, violence, friendship, and dislocation. With scalpellike precision, she teases out connections between her childhood experiences with loving and losing God and losing her faith in love as an adult. There are no easy endings in this doubled book, just an infinity loop of questions and possibilities, a twinned bank of pay phones ringing in the night, waiting for someone to answer.
A literary haunting that will burrow under your skin.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780374615406
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
A personal view of karma, likely to appeal mainly to readers curious about reincarnation and related topics.
A semiautobiographical guide to the dynamics of karma in everyday life.
A Los Angeles–based shaman and “spiritual empath,” Dunblazier stays faithful to the spirit of her earlier books, which include Heal Your Soul History (2017). She sees karma as “the accumulation of the energy of all your actions and the responses to them over time and space”—in both your past and present lives—and says that in her past lives, she’s been an African tribal leader from around 1000 BCE and a French American from the 1900s. Each of the five parts of her book begins with a parable from one of her past lives and goes on to cover a range of everyday challenges from time management to how to handle feeling attracted to someone already in a relationship. At the end of each section, the author suggests a self-help ritual that can help you achieve a goal, such as “Free Yourself from the Opinion of Others.” Dunblazier keeps her message positive, reflecting her belief that “regardless of your circumstances right now, your patterns do not obligate you to continue them if they no longer serve you,” and she packs an extensive amount of material into 325 pages. Not everyone will buy her views on subjects like demons or telepathy, and Penn’s bold illustration of a concentration camp prisoner, in an image that also shows a crowd of smiling, well-dressed people around a table bearing a vast amount of food, will strike some as insensitive. Nevertheless, even readers skeptical of whether they are reading the words of a reincarnated Chief Running Bear may be intrigued by her information on how people make use of concepts like totem animals. For most readers, this book will provide different ways of looking at things. And who wouldn’t want to believe, as the author does, that in the end “you are the master of your universe”?
A personal view of karma, likely to appeal mainly to readers curious about reincarnation and related topics. (notes, bibliography)Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9963907-6-7
Page Count: 324
Publisher: GoTracee Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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