When Moss writes, “this isn’t how it’s supposed to be,” other readers who aren’t feeling what they’re supposed to be feeling...
A graphic memoir by an author best known for her children’s books details the devastating effects of her husband’s amyotrophic lateral sclerosis on her entire family.
Though Moss has sold millions of books—particularly the Amelia’s Notebook series—she explains in the acknowledgments that “this book wasn’t easy to sell. Many agents and editors felt it was too dark or sad.” It is both of those, as the author subverts the stereotype of the noble caregiver and the patient whose fatal illness teaches everyone about the true meaning of life. Moss offers no clichéd heroism. “We’re told that major illness deepens us, makes us grateful for our lives,” she writes. “But for me, ALS doesn’t work that way. I’m not a bigger, nobler person and neither is [my husband] Harvey.” When Harvey received his diagnosis and quickly saw his health decline, he seemed to resent his wife’s attempts to help him or be closer to him. And she resented him back, not only for the impositions his illness made on her and his lack of appreciation, but for the way it altered the dynamic of the entire family. “But it’s not his disease,” she maintains, after he decreed that he would notify their children. “It’s rotting away at all of us,” writes Moss. “First it killed our marriage. Now it’s destroying our family. And then Harvey will die. What will be left of us?” Instead of the concern for Harvey that one would expect as a focus, the author is brutally honest about how hard she took his illness and how it affected her. There are brief flashes of a return of intimacy and connection between them—and sessions with a therapist provided some perspective—but it seems that only after his death could she truly reconnect with the husband she loved.
When Moss writes, “this isn’t how it’s supposed to be,” other readers who aren’t feeling what they’re supposed to be feeling could well find comfort in a kindred spirit.Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-57324-698-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Conari Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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