A thoughtful, moving account of watching a loved one gradually fade into a private world.
In this debut memoir, a writer revisits his youth, traveling a difficult path to forgiveness for the damage suffered dealing with his mother’s mental illness.
In the spring of 1957, Lyons was 14 years old. His life in Downey, California, just outside Los Angeles, was good. And then his world crashed. His mother, Phyllis, had her first mental breakdown. Until that point, he recalls Phyllis as being vivacious and popular, with a gift for the dramatic. She had a passion for literature, and she helped found the Downey Community Players. Their house had been frequently filled with an intellectual, artistic crowd. But Phyllis would spend the next 17 years in and out of psychiatric hospitals: “My mother disappeared down her own well. Many rescue attempts were made, as she was brought to the surface, then slipped back down into her private abyss. Every time she was pulled up, there seemed to be less of her.” Lyons describes his life at ages 14 and 15—which makes up the bulk of the retrospective—in vividly detailed, present-tense prose, bringing readers through the minutiae of a period filled with adolescent angst, sadness, fears for his future, and anger at his parents (his mother for disappearing and his father for catering to her relentless needs). Although he never specifies a diagnosis, her illness was manifested in deep depression and immobilizing fears. She also had a very disturbing sexual obsession with the author. In his complex memoir, some of the most poignant stories are about the homing pigeons he bred and trained for about four years. Jumping back and forth in time, Lyons connects his early adult difficulties in romantic relationships to the fear of abandonment developed during those crucial teenage years. Now in his 70s, a devoted husband and father, he writes: “I have learned to embrace my loneliness—or rather to embrace the boy who grew up lonely, the boy who in some ways I will always be.” The author has found peace, but pain and a sense of great loss permeate these pages.
A thoughtful, moving account of watching a loved one gradually fade into a private world.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9995501-5-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New Door Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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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