Candid, affecting essays cohere into a moving memoir.
Chronicles of love, loss, and healing.
In her graceful debut memoir, award-winning fiction writer, essayist, and medical writer Caschetta gathers 11 essays that reflect on family, loneliness, and her queer identity. She grew up in an Italian American neighborhood in upstate New York, the only daughter in a culturally and politically conservative family. Her father, a physician, could be cruel and demanding; her mother, deeply invested in affirming her girliness, signed her up for cheerleader tryouts. For years, she became the pompom waving enthusiast that her mother wanted. “Soon enough,” writes the author, “everything my mother dislikes about me disappears under a dirt mound in the backyard, patted into the shape of a little girl who has disappeared.” Caschetta’s closest friend was a neighbor whose father “once tried to drown his own gay son in the toilet.” That friendship, she writes, was “based on what we have in common: a place we will both have to leave to become who we are.” The author’s escape, aside from her “secret backup plan” to become a nun, was Vassar College, where she found a community and “an entirely new vocabulary” to describe herself: “feminist, queer, depressed, trauma survivor.” In New York City in the 1980s, she became an activist, joining ACT UP, Queer Nation, and the Lesbian Avengers. She found work as a medical editor for an AIDS newsletter called Treatment Issues, a job that led to her becoming a medical writer. Caschetta recounts her search for love, including a wry piece about her bumbling efforts at water skiing and snowboarding to impress a girlfriend; her abiding need to make sense “of why we live and how we die, or how we live and why we die”; and her desire to rewrite the “troubling narrative” of her life: “bad choices, difficult women, anxiety, despair.” Happily settled and married, that narrative is once again troubled, this time by the ravages of long Covid.
Candid, affecting essays cohere into a moving memoir.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-938126-77-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Engine Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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