Blurs the line between imagination and memory so thoroughly that truth struggles for visibility.
Photoshop of horrors from a writer who has suffered countless maladies during her long battle with mental illness.
Hornbacher begins when she is 20 and in one of her self-mutilation phases. Then she looks back, using relentlessly present-tense verbs to provide snapshots of prior disturbing moments, beginning with her frenzies and terrors at age four, advancing through elementary school (“I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old”), then on to cocaine and eating disorders. Psychiatrists and hospitals don’t help much; mental-health professionals are always far less clever than the author. In 1996, while working on her first book (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, 1998), she’s told that she has severe bipolar disorder. Disdaining the meds, mistaking her highs for cures, she ignores the diagnosis. Hornbacher’s prose accelerates when she’s writing about her manic periods, then slows for the depressive lulls. Later, she organizes the text in short sections labeled by year, or season, or month, or sometimes even by hour. They chronicle drinking, random sex, cutting, vomiting, anonymous boyfriends, good and bad husbands, multiple hospitalizations, alternating periods of zany mania and I’m-not-leaving-my-bed depression, multiple meds, clueless shrinks, shock therapy, cocktails of drugs. Somehow Hornbacher goes on a book tour, writes a novel (The Center of Winter, 2005), remembers pages of detailed conversations. People are always telling her that she’s hot and talented. A couple of times she says that madness and electroshock have wiped clean her memory, then she launches into more pages of verbatim witty dialogue and detailed description from days or decades ago. She ends with an epilogue chockablock with clichés like “but there is hope too” and “I am who I am.”
Blurs the line between imagination and memory so thoroughly that truth struggles for visibility.Pub Date: April 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-75445-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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