Poet and essayist Robison’s (What Matters, 2001, etc.) autobiography of madness and redemption—completing a trilogy of dysfunction of sorts, joining the memoirs of her sons, Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors, 2002) and John Elder Robison (Look Me in the Eye, 2007).
The author was raised in rural Georgia in the 1930s amid a family of secrets—a depressed father and a mother defeated by life, and aunts not spoken of who were spirited away to mental institutions. In her search for her artistic voice and confused sexuality, she bent to the will of family and times. Doing what was expected of her, she married John, a young divinity student and later a philosophy professor. John could be loving and kind, but more often—over decades of married life—drunk, violent and psychotic, with frequent and recurrent stays in psychiatric hospitals. In the process, he left deep wounds on his wife and children. Finally, depression and psychosis overtook Robison herself and she too was committed. Yet, as she writes, “madness broke through the thick walls of repression,” and she began to write. Still, she had to extricate herself from John and from an ersatz and cult-like psychiatrist, under whose spell she had fallen until he tried to rape her. But Robison persevered, continuing to write and teach and finding love and companionship with a woman. Though a stroke rendered her left side paralyzed, she eventually regained the speech she had lost. She also found her voice, and in old age made the story of her life her own. Robison’s story, fairly or not, is really one about women and men—how women can become lost and wounded in the world of men and saved and renewed in the world of women. A harshly honest memoir that paints a portrait of a woman and a life, both brave and flawed.
Pub Date: May 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6869-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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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