The bond between mother and child knows no bounds in this intense memoir darkened by addiction and bipolar disorder yet...
A mother recounts her trials caring for a son derailed by mental illness and substance abuse.
McGuire’s debut memoir begins with her pregnancy and ensuing marriage to boyfriend Jerry when both were college seniors in 1967. Sacrifices were made: the author surrendered her graduate school fellowship to move to Philadelphia, where her husband attended law school amid the births of their son, Ryan, and daughter, Liz. Though the family’s subsequent relocation to Los Angeles went smoothly, Ryan, an increasingly energetic child, became plagued by accidents, with one sledding injury cracking his skull when he was just 3. After divorcing Jerry, McGuire writes of wondering if this incident induced the brain trauma responsible for Ryan’s future battle with bipolar disorder, a condition that surfaced late in his collegiate years and worsened after moving to San Francisco, where heroin abuse took its toll. As this played out, McGuire emerged as a naïve, doting mother, easily swayed toward the enablement of Ryan’s dishonesty and self-destructive behavior—quick to hold her son blameless for his transgressions. “My love and concern for him often blinded me to the truth,” she admits. McGuire recalls the horror she felt when her son described “how great” heroin was and the bouts of paranoia that caused him to ride his bicycle up the California coast out of fear that his mental state would cause an earthquake back home. As her heartfelt and moving story descends further into the realms of despair and desperation, the author remains a beacon of hope and sets an amazing example for readers caught in a similar situation involving mental illness and a family member. While tracking Ryan’s cyclical behavior which landed him everywhere from psych wards and emergency rooms to rehab facilities and prison, McGuire continued to evolve with a new relationship and her daughter’s marriage. The author writes with a passionate flair, and she narrates the details of her family melodrama with conviction and a creative eye. Though hers was an all-consuming ordeal, McGuire finally wrested control of her emotional well-being and her life just as her son began to show signs of progress. A generous closing section of crisis counseling and referral resources forms a helpful coda to a harrowing family tale of sorrow, optimism, and recovery.
The bond between mother and child knows no bounds in this intense memoir darkened by addiction and bipolar disorder yet buoyed by love and possibility.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-125-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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