A memoir that is both relatable and subversive.
An Emmy-winning comedy writer's graphic memoir about her odyssey into diaries she kept as a young girl growing up in the 1950s and ’60s.
When Markoe began looking through her girlhood journals, she writes, “I was amazed at how much it felt like I was reading about a stranger.” She discovered long-forgotten—and sometimes painfully embarrassing—entries detailing the minutiae of her daily life, such as a weight-loss recommendation from her doctor that sent her "spiraling into a lifetime of obsessive dieting.” More significantly, she encountered the outlines of her developing self: a girl "steeped in pop culture" who considered the TV her “best friend” and routinely fought her one-time "relentless adversary,” her brother. With a mixture of mortification and amusement, Markoe observes how her younger self faithfully recorded such events such as the Cuban missile crisis alongside those involving a string of unrequited loves that began in the fourth grade. During one especially hilarious romantic mishap, Markoe interpreted a Nazi salute a crush gave her as a sign of his undying affection. "On the cusp of 15,” she left Florida for San Francisco with her family. As the new girl, she quickly developed survival strategies that “put me at war with my parents.” Teenage angst eventually drove her to seek refuge in art, her diary, and humor, which she used to combat tensions with her parents that she did not escape until she went to the University of California at Berkeley. Markoe's bold, sometimes absurdist drawings and the often chiding conversations she imagines between her mature and adolescent selves enhance the comedy at the heart of this thought-provoking story about what happens when the wisdom of age confronts the follies and foibles of youth. “I wish I could say I became smarter about handling love relationships,” she writes near the end, “but a lifetime consumption of books and movies had taught me some very bad ideas about how it was all supposed to work.”
A memoir that is both relatable and subversive.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-903-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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