An intimate dual portrait that brings the author’s life into vibrant focus.
Szabo recalls two foundational relationships in this personal memoir.
From a young age, the author was truly her father’s daughter. “My father claimed me right away,” she writes. “I was his. My little sister was my mother’s.” A Hungarian gentleman with Old-World charm, Szabo’s father instructed her on how to present herself to the world, from eating soup properly to correctly hanging her jacket in the theater. He warned her not to become a “bubblegum person”—a classless, mindless consumer of junk—as he felt most Americans do. Such a father proved impossible to please, and, as Szabo grew older, his demands placed an increasing strain on their relationship. After high school, while taking a writing class in New York, Szabo met a wealthy young man who soon loomed nearly as large as her father in her life. This boyfriend knew the city, the latest records, and how to be effortlessly cool, and he introduced Szabo to a whole new way of existing in the world. She soon moved with him to Los Angeles, where he would pursue a career in film. In short vignettes, Szabo traces her relationships with both of these men, the “first two” who helped to shape her relationships with all others. Szabo’s prose is stark and effortless. She paints in quiet images that nevertheless seem to vibrate with emotional intensity, as when she laments her fights with her boyfriend: “If I take him out of my life there is not much left. I don’t know why that is. He stays busy whether I am there or not. He still makes Rice Krispy chicken for dinner, he still lights up a joint, he still goes out for ice cream.” Though no strong narrative thread weaves the vignettes together, a theme emerges about the ways in which parents and lovers exert a profound gravitational pull on us, particularly in our formative years. Fans of literary memoirs will enjoy this fragmentary examination of two nearly universal relationships: the larger-than-life parent and the first significant love.
An intimate dual portrait that brings the author’s life into vibrant focus.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2022
ISBN: 9780996412216
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Tinker Street Press
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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