Expertly captures grace within depravity.
In her provocative debut, Febos chronicles her descent into drug and sex addiction and her harrowing escape from both.
Already a heroin addict in 1999, the author moved to New York to attend college at the New School. A chance encounter with a neighbor led her to find work in an upscale S&M house. For the next four years she was a professional dominatrix. Febos pulls no punches as she describes in minute, and at times horrific, detail her working life fulfilling the sexual fantasies of men who need to be humiliated (or to humiliate), where the tools of her trade included “latex enema, colon tube, Bardex, clamps, catheter, piercing needles, leather cuffs.” At first she viewed the work as just a well-paying gig, but she began to realize that it also fulfilled personal needs that had seemingly always been there—a need to seduce, to be desired, to control but also, paradoxically, to be controlled. She was seduced by “the romance of misbehavior” and “the exhilaration of secrecy.” She considered herself smart and clever enough to be both “normal”—the brilliant student with a bright writing future—and a drug-addled sex worker who increasingly crossed self-imposed barriers of what she would not do for money and attention. Eventually her dual life began to destroy her, and her intellectual arrogance gave way to the realization that “my compulsions were simply stronger than my will.” Her drug life was reduced to locking herself in her room with “a glass of water, a bag of puke, and a coffee can full of pee in the closet.” With much suffering and plenty of help, she ended her drug addiction, but the sex addiction remained. Not until she learned to accept the essential truth about herself was she able to escape the demons that haunted her and the depression they nurtured. In lesser hands this could be a maudlin, salacious tale, but Febos’s electrifying prose and unremitting honesty continually challenge the reader.
Expertly captures grace within depravity.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-56102-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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