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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
