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
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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