A detailed, engaging account even though portions veer into wordy self-analysis.
A memoir explores one woman’s topsy-turvy life.
Doig (Kitchen Table Stories, 2007, etc.) opens her book with the story of her parents. Joe and Audrey got married in 1940, and in 1942, the author was born. The young family moved around a lot, and the relationship between Joe and Audrey became increasingly rocky. They eventually divorced, and in 1962, Doig entered her own troubled marriage. In the pages that follow, the author explains her adulthood with its variety of ups and downs. She dropped out of college, suffered a horrific car accident, was abandoned by her first husband, struggled to return to college as a single mother, lost a child in another auto crash, and lived on a dairy farm with her second spouse. But such incidents are merely the beginning. Later in life, Doig became a foster-care caseworker, worked with a therapist on her own problems, and even spent some time in a mental institution. She looks back on her life with the benefit of psychoanalysis, reflecting, for instance, on how she found herself dissociating at her son’s funeral. But the account is at its most striking when it portrays indisputably stark events, with or without the benefit of psychoanalytical terms. The loss of Doig’s son is the sort of tragedy that never truly goes away. Later, the author, whose relationship with her father was frequently fraught, found herself escorting him to one last visit to his favorite bar before taking him to the nursing home where he would ultimately die. While the scene may be mundane, it deftly incorporates a range of emotions, none of which are happy ones. But at times, the language of therapy can cut into otherwise powerful episodes. At one point, Doig explains how she and her daughters learned “healthier expressions of anger,” though that description does not make for the most stirring prose. Nevertheless, in the end, readers should come away with honest insights gleaned from a life of personal trials.
A detailed, engaging account even though portions veer into wordy self-analysis.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-63152-449-3
Page Count: 341
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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