bookshelf

HIS OTHER LIFE

Name: HIS OTHER LIFE
Author: Melanie McCabe
ISBN: 978-1-60801-134-6

SEARCHING FOR MY FATHER, HIS FIRST WIFE, AND TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

by Melanie McCabe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2017

A compelling personal and literary detective story.

bookshelf

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 Finding clues sends her down a rabbit hole of biographies, old pictures, ancestral records, letters, unpublished novels, court documents, and desperate cross-country searches for living descendants; each new piece is another layer to an increasingly complex puzzle.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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

bookshelf

THE FIXED STARS

by Molly Wizenberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2020

A courageous and thought-provoking memoir.

bookshelf

A bestselling memoirist’s account of coping with an unexpected midlife evolution in sexual identity.

When Wizenberg, who runs the popular Orangette blog, received a jury duty summons, she never thought that it would lead to divorce. In court, her eyes were immediately drawn to a female defense attorney dressed in a men’s suit. Her thoughts lingered on the attractive stranger after each day’s proceedings. But guilt at being “a woman wearing a wedding ring” made the author feel increasingly guilty for the obsession that seized her. Her husband, Brandon, a successful Seattle restaurateur, and their daughter were the “stars” that guided her path; the books she had written revolved like planets around the sun of their relationship and the restaurants they had founded together. However, in the weeks that followed, Wizenberg shocked herself by telling her husband about the attraction and suggesting that they open their marriage to polyamorous experimentation. Reading the work of writers like Adrienne Rich who had discovered their lesbianism later in life, Wizenberg engaged in deep, sometimes-painful self-interrogation. The author remembered the story of a married uncle, a man she resembled, who came out as gay and then later died of AIDS as well as a brief lesbian flirtation in late adolescence where “nothing happened.” Eventually, Wizenberg began dating the lawyer and fell in love with her. Wizenberg then began the painful process of separating herself from Brandon and, later, from their restaurant businesses that she had quietly seen as impediments to her writing. Feeling unfulfilled by Nora, a self-professed “stone top” who preferred to give pleasure rather than receive it, Wizenberg began to date a nonbinary person named Ash. Through that relationship, she came to embrace both gender and sexual fluidity. Interwoven throughout with research insights into the complexity of female sexual identity, Wizenberg’s book not only offers a glimpse into the shifting nature of selfhood; it also celebrates one woman’s hard-won acceptance of her own sexual difference.

A courageous and thought-provoking memoir.

Pub Date: May 12, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-4197-4299-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Abrams

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

bookshelf

GIRL, INTERRUPTED

by Susanna Kaysen ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1993

bookshelf

When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.