An intense depiction of trauma and recovery.
A motivational speaker and businesswoman recounts her journey through sexual abuse, drug addiction, health issues, and more in this memoir.
The only child of an unhappily married World War II widow and a prisoner of war, German-born Spencer-Devlin (The Iceberg Principles, 2013) writes that she was sexually molested by her older stepbrothers at an early age; set up on a date by her own father at age 12, during which she was raped; and became the girlfriend of a local pimp at 16. She experienced some success as a model but then relocated to the United States after an American beau proposed to her, although that marriage soon disintegrated. She spent years struggling with heroin addiction and several relationships, during which she participated in burglaries and spent time as a prostitute and in prison. Eventually settling in California, she started to stabilize her life with the support of church groups and rehab and then founded a successful mailing business with her second husband. After seeking out therapy during a stressful time in this marriage, Spencer-Devlin says she finally fully confronted her childhood abuse and embraced the gay identity she’d long suppressed. She eventually left her husband and pursued long-term lesbian relationships, including with professional golfer Muffin Spencer-Devlin, whom she married. By memoir’s end, she tells of suffering financial losses and dealing with health concerns, including hepatitis C, but she also says that she’s now in a “state of Enlightenment” thanks to her writing. The author, in her first memoir, has written a compelling account of acting-out, addiction, and other self-destructive actions that arose from her early childhood traumas. The fact that the act of writing has served as therapy for her is reflected in this narrative, in which she views the people, places, and events in her life in a cleareyed but also ultimately accepting way. However, Spencer-Devlin’s post-recovery activities, such as her time as a motivational speaker, may be of less interest to some readers; they’re also rather hurriedly addressed here and perhaps may be better developed in a future book. Overall, though, this book is full of insightful testimony.
An intense depiction of trauma and recovery.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5087-0427-0
Page Count: 358
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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