A multilayered memoir that successfully weaves historical detail with familial emotions of different generations and...
Family lore is shared and family secrets are revealed in this two-in-one memoir, which also offers a unique perspective of a pivotal period in 20th-century Chinese history.
After Ruth Tsao Chai’s death, her surprised family discovered that she had secretly arranged to be buried alone rather than in the plot she and her devoted husband had purchased years before. In order to understand Ruth’s strange choice, her first-born son, Winberg, and her granddaughter, May-lee (My Lucky Face, 1997) examine the woman’s eventful life. Through alternating narratives and points of view, a three-dimensional portrait emerges of a woman who defied traditional expectations. Intelligent, beautiful, stubborn, and a Christian, Ruth was one of the first women admitted to a university in China. She refused an arranged marriage and instead chose Charles, who courted her while they were both students in the US. After they married and returned to China, they became involved in the country’s changing political tides and significant events—including the Japanese invasions. It was Ruth’s intuition that kept her family alive during WWII and enabled them to immigrate to the US. But her life never really turned out as she truly wished, and she grew resentful and suspicious with age and eventually made her unusual burial request. In their investigations, son and granddaughter journeyed to China, where Winberg’s memories were rekindled and May-lee gained a sense of her own identity by learning about her family’s origins. A personal photo appears at the start of each chapter, which nicely creates the illusion of thumbing through a family album. By looking at the faces of people now departed but once vividly alive (especially Ruth’s, as she ages through the chapters), the reader is inspired to address universal moods and longings.
A multilayered memoir that successfully weaves historical detail with familial emotions of different generations and fulfills Ruth’s ultimate wish: to be remembered. (b&w photos throughout)Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26808-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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SEEN & HEARD
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
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