Phillips’s rebirth is a beautiful thing to behold, fresh air rushing through a scarred system.
A hard-bitten, working-class childhood on the fringes of decaying Buffalo, New York, goes a long way toward rendering freelancer Phillips’s memoir into a plaint, an extended ache that finds its way right into the reader’s heart.
Like a good train wreck, this family history has a way of holding your attention despite the pain and sorrow. Buffalo had aged badly by the time Phillips was born into the shadow of the cruddy industrial city in the 1950s. His father was an enormous presence, albeit a mostly absent one as he poured on the overtime at the power plant, breathing in the coal dust as he spot-welded the rickety equipment, pushing to make every possible dollar, then to return home to collapse before the television, with a beer and a butt. He was exhausted and tetchy, a combination monster and guardian angel, who endured “boring dangerous filthy sweaty deafening work” in hopes of saving enough money to buy a piece of land in the Alleghenies: to hunt and fish, to commune with his son. The father’s dream isn’t shared by the family, and it is not a happy life, though not a grossly unhappy one. But it gets no better for the young Phillips when he develops Tourette’s syndrome. Teased at home and at school for his garden of tics and weird talk, he becomes withdrawn and violent, anonymously disruptive at school, all the while fiercely trying to control his behavior. His writing echoes that emotional stifling: blanched and hollow-eyed, eerie and foreboding and breathtaking, it’s close to a heart monitor’s flat line. Then, in a terrible saving grace, as his father dies a long death to cancer, the cabin is built, father and son tangle their heartstrings, the “coal-black and electric-bright American dream” becomes fate and fatality, and Phillips goes on to a better life by far, a life in that very same cabin.
Phillips’s rebirth is a beautiful thing to behold, fresh air rushing through a scarred system.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58574-391-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Solid, practical advice for women on how to properly nurture their sons.
How women can raise boys to become good men.
More than ever, women are under pressure to be "everything to everyone," writes Meeker (The 10 Habits of Happy Mothers: Reclaiming Our Passion, Purpose, and Sanity, 2010, etc.), as "working women feel that they must perform equally well both in the office and in caring for their home, husband, and children." The dynamics of raising boys is especially difficult for women due to the gender difference and the fact that women tend to be nurturing and helpful while allowing their sons to evolve into men in a constantly shifting masculine paradigm. Through research and interviews from her own practice, Meeker gives women the necessary tools to understand that perfection is not a realistic goal but that doing the best one can will ensure good results. Equally useful to single mothers and women with husbands is the advice that sons need to know they are loved from a very young age, as this builds a foundation of confidence in a child, a base that allows a boy to gradually move away from his mother as he interacts with male peers and elders. A boy's home life must be solid: a safe haven to return to regardless of his age, a place where his thoughts and feelings are respected and where he can express his hopes and dreams without fear of judgment. Meeker recommends introducing boys to religion, prayer and the unconditional love that comes from having a strong faith to boost self-confidence. She also skillfully navigates the world of sex—from a boy's first body awareness to the powerful effects of pornography and sexual messages embedded in social media, video games and news media, to his interactions in the world of girls and women. A mother's imprint on her son is powerful right from birth and remains so throughout her son's life. Meeker's advice gives women the tools to navigate these often rocky waters with confidence.
Solid, practical advice for women on how to properly nurture their sons.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-51809-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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