A compelling personal and literary detective story.
A writer and English and creative writing teacher plumbs her father’s past for the story of his first wife and discovers the tragic muse for one of America's greatest playwrights.
At the age of 16, McCabe (What the Neighbors Know, 2014, etc.) learned a long-held family secret about her recently deceased father: well before she was born, he had a troubled first marriage to a woman who had long since died. Years later, she learned that both her father and his first wife were also literary characters in an obscure Tennessee Williams play—and that both had known the playwright well. In this debut memoir, McCabe pieces together the hidden story of her father’s life, the mysterious woman in it, and the impact she had on both her father and Williams. The picture that emerges has all the elements of a Williams drama, where life can be squandered on an imaginary fortune, blighted dreams, unconsummated desires, and the deadly solace of drug addiction. For the homosexual Williams, Hazel—the woman who would marry McCabe's father, Terence—was the woman he could neither have nor forget. “I never loved anyone as I loved her,” he later wrote. For Terence, Hazel was a doe-eyed beauty and a source of emotional anguish. For McCabe, the marriage offers insight into the man her father was and who he became. “He made certain that my sister and I did not glimpse any of his failures or weaknesses,” she writes. “He steered us swiftly away from his ‘dark places.’ ” Along the way, the book also becomes a tale of its author’s own self-discovery, as she weighs her father’s life and relationships against her own. Finding clues sends her down a rabbit hole of biographies, old pictures, ancestral records, letters, unpublished novels, court documents, and desperate cross-country searches for living descendants; each new piece is another layer to an increasingly complex puzzle.
A compelling personal and literary detective story.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60801-134-6
Page Count: 300
Publisher: UNO Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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