A candid, moving memoir about the many complexities of family.
In a debut memoir, a former CNN reporter and current Emmy Award–winning Good Morning America producer recounts her family’s painful history.
Before Peterson was 10, both her parents had suffered mental breakdowns; her father, after two suicide attempts, finally confessed to his wife that he was gay. After the couple divorced, her mother plummeted into severe depression. For months, she was hospitalized, while her daughter expressed her own pain by reverting to bed-wetting. When her mother returned home, although as warm and loving as she always had been, her spirit seemed broken. Her weight ballooned, she no longer cared about her physical appearance, and, most alarming, she let the house become overrun with debris: newspapers, unopened mail, dirty dishes and clothing, dust and grime. When appliances broke, she failed to get them fixed. The kitchen, Peterson recalls, “began to take on the feel of a used appliance museum.” For college, Peterson left her Wisconsin home for Manhattan and then moved to Atlanta, Germany, and Turkey on posts for CNN. Each time she returned, however, she saw her mother increasingly overwhelmed with trash, refusing Peterson’s offer to help, to hire cleaners, or to find another place to live. Even her car was stuffed with garbage, and the house became infested with mice, chipmunks, bats, and insects. For years, the toilets did not work, causing an acrid stench. As the author’s career took off and as she married and had children, her mother deteriorated, barring everyone from the house and denying that she was a hoarder. Peterson reminded her of their shared love of white dresses, “a way of starting over…a way of wiping the whole slate clean.” But her mother was incapable of renewal, and she died trapped by depression, loneliness, and chaos. Peterson’s generous homage to her mother offers an empathetic look at a baffling, frustrating mental illness.
A candid, moving memoir about the many complexities of family.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-238697-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
For the author’s fans.
A Fox News journalist and talk show host sets out to prove that she is not “an empty St. John suit in five-inch stiletto heels.”
The child of devout Christians, Minnesota native Carlson’s first love was music. She began playing violin at age 6 and quickly revealed that she was not only a prodigy, but also a little girl who thrived on pleasing audiences. Working with top teachers, she developed her art over the years. But by 16, Carlson began “chafing at [the] rigid, structured life” of a concert violinist–in-training and temporarily put music aside. At the urging of her mother, the high achiever set her sights on winning the Miss T.E.E.N. pageant, where she was first runner-up. College life at Stanford became yet another quest for perfection that led Carlson to admit it was “not attainable” after she earned a C in one class. At the end of her junior year and again at the urging of her mother, Carlson entered the 1989 Miss America pageant, which she would go on to win thanks to a brilliant violin performance. Dubbed the “smart Miss America,” Carlson struggled with pageant stereotypes as well as public perceptions of who she was. Being in the media spotlight every day during her reign, however, also helped her decide on a career in broadcast journalism. Yet success did not come easily. Sexual harassment dogged her, and many expressed skepticism about her abilities due to her pageant past. Even after she rose to national prominence, first as a CBS news broadcaster and then as a Fox talk show host, Carlson continued—and continues—to be labeled as “dumb or a bimbo.” Her history clearly demonstrates that she is neither. However, Carlson’s overly earnest tone, combined with her desire to show her Minnesota “niceness…in action,” as well as the existence of “abundant brain cells,” dampens the book’s impact.
For the author’s fans.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42745-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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