A candid, sometimes prosaic memoir of coping with grief and moving forward.
An award-winning screenwriter’s account of how she survived the unexpected death of her beloved husband and learned to navigate life on her own.
Gould had been married for 10 years when doctors diagnosed her healthy, athletic husband, Joel, with multiple sclerosis. Joel managed his illness well with drugs, but as he neared his 50th birthday, "the MS was getting hard to ignore.” Then, two months after he turned 50, Joel suddenly became ill with West Nile virus, which left him paralyzed and brain damaged. Gould had to make the extremely painful decision to end life support. Afterward, her life felt like an "uphill" climb that offered no reprieve from the feelings of loss she suffered, and she spent each night remembering Joel with her daughter. “In the dark weeks that followed,” she writes, “there were beacons of light shining a path for Sophie and me to follow.” Financial worries added "to the stress of grief.” She began looking for signs of Joel's love for her and believed she found it when she accidentally stumbled across a Joel Osteen radio program that promoted positive spirituality and gratitude. A psychic medium later told the author that Joel “was still with” her and that he approved of the new man that the psychic predicted would enter her life. Not long after that, Gould finally began to refer to herself as a widow despite her preconceived notion that such women were "old, wrinkled, tragic. Wearing black. Maybe even a veil.” Acknowledgment of who she had become led to other breakthroughs, including friendships with other widows who led full lives and a passionate connection with a musician. The main strength of this memoir is Gould’s insight into the impact that spousal loss has on personal identity. Though not a standout in this genre, Gould's book will appeal to women seeking to understand the meaning of widowhood.
A candid, sometimes prosaic memoir of coping with grief and moving forward.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1878-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
Lucci’s legion of fans will adore this gracious nod to her career longevity and positivity.
Daytime television’s most recognizable actress digs deeper in this second memoir.
Her career-defining, four decades–long stint on the daytime soap All My Children as the villainous Erica Kane has made Lucci a recognizable household name in daytime television circles. In this sophomore effort, comprised of a vivid and engaging collection of anecdotes and adventures, the actress reveals more intimate details of her struggles as well as her personal life and professional career. From the time she began performing in high school stage musicals, Lucci admits to always wanting to be onstage. Working through chronic shyness, her self-motivation and spirit drove her to pursue an acting career despite the many disappointments, callous dismissals, and various roadblocks that stood in her way. She expresses an open admiration for her parents, fellow performers who mentored her up the Hollywood ladder, and Muhammad Ali, who “owned his excellence,” as models of inspiration. Other sections reflect on her time as a working mother, the tricks to “growing old gracefully,” and how her faith, quest for joy, love of reading, and zest for life continue to sustain her. In an effort to create a more balanced memoir, Lucci also opens up to candidly share several sad and unsavory moments like being told she should probably abandon a career in television because she was too “ethnic looking”; the devastating day All My Children was canceled; the near loss of her son, Andreas, as an infant; and the feeling, upon the death of her husband, Helmut, in 2022, that the light within her “had gone out forever.” However crushing these events in her life were, they were counterbalanced with uplifting triumphs and only served as motivators to continue pushing forward to seek out the success and happiness she knew she deserved. With verve and perseverance, Lucci gleefully boasts about her starring roles in off-Broadway hits and concurrent film roles, yet, in her late 70s, she remains deeply grateful and humble and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.
Lucci’s legion of fans will adore this gracious nod to her career longevity and positivity.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9798874868284
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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
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