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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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