An honest and affecting story of the many complexities involved with family relationships.
A debut memoir about a woman’s emotionally charged relationship with the mother who walked away from her marriage and family.
The youngest of three children, Cistaro was barely out of toddlerhood when her mother got into her Dodge Dart and suddenly drove off. She neither called nor acknowledged her children’s birthdays for the first few years of her absence. Only later would she connect with them, but only for short periods of time. When she did, it was often in the company of different men with whom she shared homes as well as alcohol and drugs. Cistaro’s mother was constantly—and painfully—“just out of…reach” of the children who craved her love. The author and her brothers became each other’s main sources of support, and their father did his imperfect best to hold the family together. However, the children each carried a deep anguish that marked them for life. Both her brothers eventually became substance abusers, while Cistaro narrowly avoided a similar fate. She went on to build a happy, stable marriage and family, but privately, she lived with the constant fear that she carried a “leaving gene” that would cause her to want to abandon her own family. When she learned one Christmas that her mother was dying, all her old fears of being left behind resurfaced. The author went to her mother’s side to “hold [the] body” she had not touched since childhood. During her stay, she discovered letters her mother had written but not sent to Cistaro and her brothers. From them, she gained insight into the powerfully contradictory impulses that drove her mother and that often surfaced in herself. The author finally found peace knowing that while her mother ultimately needed to fly free, Cistaro could embrace “the messy, maddening beauty” that responsibilities brought to her life with equanimity and even joy.
An honest and affecting story of the many complexities involved with family relationships.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4926-1538-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
PROFILES
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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