An earnest but uneven treatise that encourages informed choices by those facing intense pressure to have children.
A nonfiction work that aims to shed light on the real difficulties of motherhood and redefine it as just one path among many.
According to Holmes, despite the gains of feminism, most women have been “indoctrinated” into believing that motherhood is their main goal by a society that puts too much emphasis on its joys and not enough on its challenges. The author, a mother of three, wrote this book, in part, to inform her own daughter of motherhood’s gritty truths. For example, “Dirty Little Secret #1” is that “You will lose a big part of yourself once you become a mom”; and “Dirty Little Secret #8” is that “Kids are grounded in the belief that their moms revolve around them, even into adulthood.” Using personal experience, interviews, polls, and vignettes about women with and without children, Holmes discusses issues such as work/life balance, competitive mothering (including elaborate children’s birthday parties), the emotional and financial costs of kids, and parenting when single or divorced. She also considers issues such as access to birth control, choosing childlessness, and rewriting cultural scripts. Although some of the book could apply to men, Holmes specifically addresses women because, she says, men aren’t “grilled as regularly about procreating.” She admits that “This conversation has been around before,” but “in the words of writer and lecturer Stephanie Mills, ‘the topic keeps vanishing.’ ” It’s a good thing to counteract overly sentimental, restrictive views of motherhood and encourage thoughtfulness. However, Holmes’ tone of revelation is puzzling, particularly regarding the so-called “secrets.” Kids are demanding, they get into your stuff, and they’re expensive—but is any of this surprising? The author also seems to take her own experiences (including her Catholic childhood in a conservative family, her naiveté about child-rearing, and her unwillingness to face family pressure) as the norm, and she doesn’t deeply examine some of her choices, such as performing all of her household’s child-rearing and housekeeping tasks while also working full-time. She weakens her argument through hyperbole, such as by characterizing socialization as “indoctrination” that’s impossible to overcome—despite her own contrary examples of women who are childless by choice.
An earnest but uneven treatise that encourages informed choices by those facing intense pressure to have children.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500933050
Page Count: 202
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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