An unflinchingly honest portrait of grief and survival that many fellow travelers will find comforting.
A veteran journalist shares the anguish of losing a son to suicide in this debut memoir that tracks her painful path to acceptance.
On Aug. 28, 2010, Thomson received a devastating phone call from her daughter-in-law. Kieran, the author’s son from her first marriage, had fatally shot himself. He was just a few months shy of his 23rd birthday, married, and the father of an almost 2-year-old daughter, Ailbe. In January 2009, he had enlisted in the Army. The decision filled Thomson with alarm, but Kieran was convinced this was his best option. He was trained as a medic, and he and his family were living at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, awaiting his deployment to Afghanistan. Kieran became one of 14 suicides at Fort Bragg that year. The narrative shifts back and forth seamlessly between present and past. Everything during the next two years triggered a memory from all the yesterdays with Kieran. The author reviews the pivotal events in his life—his birth in London; Thomson and her son’s move to her home in Tennessee; her new marriage; the birth of her son Matthew; and Kieran’s troubled teenage years. She writes: “Something, it seemed, wasn’t quite right” early on. Kieran was diagnosed with a newly classified learning disability that made social interactions difficult. The author brings readers along with her through the emotionally wrenching ordeal of a memorial service at Fort Bragg, the funeral in Middle Tennessee, and another memorial service at her family church in Memphis—all articulately and painstakingly chronicled. She muses: “Death seems to have a lot to do with logistics, I think. Moving from point A to point B.” But suicide adds its own excruciating dimension to the tragedy, telling “the shell-shocked survivor in the most horrific way imaginable that no matter what you did, it wasn’t enough.” Still, after two meticulously documented years of pushing through a gripping and toxic mix of sorrow, wide-ranging anger, and guilt, she takes a wonderfully surprising “leap” toward the future.
An unflinchingly honest portrait of grief and survival that many fellow travelers will find comforting.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-693-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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