Candid, disquieting memories.
A writer’s struggles.
Award-winning novelist, poet, and children’s book author and illustrator Haddon offers a montage of 87 brief recollections and vignettes to create an absorbing, melancholy memoir. Recalling his childhood in Northampton, England, Haddon finds memory elusive, “as if I were leafing through a damaged photo album, individual snapshots separated by gaps where many other pictures have fallen out.” What he does remember is a father “with a short fuse” and a racist, sexist, homophobic mother who never wanted to have children, but was afraid of other people’s disapproval if she didn’t. Family life was repressive: “I never heard an adult tell or ask another adult something that really mattered,” he writes. Anxiety and depression that started in childhood dogged him throughout his life, often emerging as hypochondria (he feared getting multiple sclerosis and/or cancer) and a debilitating fear of flying. When he was 12, he was sent to boarding school, where boys were either bullied or became bullies, and where he was beaten by his headmaster. Haddon refers to two mental breakdowns, and to deliberate cutting. “I do it,” he writes, “because I’m uncontrollably angry with myself and there’s just too much pressure inside my head.” Running provided a much-needed emotional outlet, until sudden shortness of breath led, in 2019, to an emergency triple heart bypass. Among the many illustrations (drawings by Haddon, some by his father), family photos, and assorted other images, there’s a photo of the author, chest bare, displaying his surgical scar. Another image shows his arm, stitched after he cut too deeply. Other scars are not physically visible. Although Haddon reflects on positive aspects of his life—his teaching, writing, happy marriage, fatherhood, and deeply satisfying volunteer work with the Samaritans—darkness and sadness pervade his forthright memoir.
Candid, disquieting memories.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780385551892
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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