Sordid, compulsively readable entries that lay bare a troubled soul painstakingly on the mend.
Depression, anxiety, panic disorder, and addiction all resonate in this outspoken collection of essays.
Broder’s (Scarecrone, 2014, etc.) collection of 18 provocative essays began in 2012 as a formerly anonymous Twitter account loaded with dark humor and downward mood swings. Since its unmasking, the author now fully embraces the peaks and valleys of her emotional landscape as she attempts to “fill my many insatiable internal holes with external stuff.” Following a cursory glance at her upbringing, where “the religion of the household quickly became food,” Broder admits to chronically chewing her nails and ingesting other bodily products to “find comfort...even in the darkest, most disgusting places.” This graphic depiction of her youthful melancholy suitably sets the tone for the remainder of the essays, mostly overcast with angst yet punctuated with self-deprecating humor. The author lucidly describes her post-collegiate years living in Northern California, “melting down” in a whirlwind of alcohol, drugs, sexual experimentation, and employment in “a Tantric sex nonprofit.” Some sections read like slam poetry, as when Broder ruminates about love, graphic sexting with an online flame, or the things that bring her shame. The answers to an Internet addiction quiz compellingly illuminate her innermost fears of death and rejection. The author digs even deeper as she unveils an odd affinity for nicotine gum, Botox, open marriage, and a fetish for vomit, something she believes taps into the “dark, untouched corners within all of us.” While Effexor played an integral part, readers will also realize that Broder’s tweets were just as instrumental in her sobriety. In these vividly rendered and outspokenly delivered essays, the author admits to being in better shape now than before, and “sending what I was feeling out into the universe” has become the ultimate wellness elixir.
Sordid, compulsively readable entries that lay bare a troubled soul painstakingly on the mend.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4555-6272-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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