A gripping, tragic and unforgettable chronicle of lost innocence and abuse.
Disquieting memoir about the 15-year relationship between a child and a predatory sexagenarian.
Fragoso’s New Jersey childhood consisted of sharing a bed in a slummy, cramped one-bedroom apartment with her mentally ill mother and hard-drinking, Army-veteran father, who worked as a jeweler. She was just seven when she met 51-year-old pedophile Peter Curran at a public pool in 1985 and subsequently invited to his home. Hopelessly unaware of the inappropriateness of the arrangement, her naive mother joined her daughter on a series of visits to Curran’s expansive house—an interactive, wide-eyed wonderland alive with his two young sons and a vast array of kid-friendly pets. A perfect escape from her family life, Fragoso’s chaperoned (then solo) visits became more frequent as Curran drew closer and more physically daring. At first, he’d discreetly hug and kiss her in the basement, then coerced her into clumsy, manipulative sexual advances, labeling his actions as “something that people in love, like we are, do together.” Eventually, Fragoso’s perceptive father forbade her from visiting Curran, who continued to take in a random series of female foster children. But the carefree whimsy of the author’s childhood had already fallen victim to Curran’s premeditated manipulation. After reuniting with him two years later (as her mother’s sanity deteriorated), Fragoso became withdrawn, increasingly codependent and cooperative during their sex games. In wincingly frank, graphic scenes, the author intricately details her harrowing evolution from a doe-eyed innocent girl to a broken, emotionally scarred victim who, at 22, was further crushed after receiving Curran’s 10 handwritten suicide notes along with the key to his car. Culled from the four diaries she kept during the ordeal, Fragoso writes with searing honesty about her serpentine entanglement and of Curran’s calculated, menacing exploitation of her. Intensive psychotherapy and new motherhood provide a hopeful coda to her unspeakable experience.
A gripping, tragic and unforgettable chronicle of lost innocence and abuse.Pub Date: March 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27762-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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