A moving examination of personal trauma and the healing power of queer community.
A queer interior designer recounts a traumatic childhood in Ontario and its lingering influence on his adult life in this debut memoir.
This more-bitter-than-sweet remembrance starts at the beginning, with the two-month premature birth of Plasse-Taylor in Toronto in 1954. He spent his first weeks of life in an incubator in the hospital’s newborn intensive care unit, and the author expresses his belief that the lack of physical bonding with his mother, Edna Taylor, set the tone for their lifelong strained relationship, which included physical abuse. He notes that his mother was clinically depressed and anxious and that she raised 12 children, mostly alone; she ran away from her home at a rural Ontario farm at the age of 13. The author, before coming out as gay in his late teens, found solace in his older sister, Janet, and the arts, including choir, theater, and interior design. At 15, he attempted suicide, after which he filed papers to be emancipated from his mother, and he moved in with his neighbors. He attended two Canadian universities before enrolling at Pratt Institute in Manhattan in 1981, where he thrived within the queer community; he ran in the same circles as famed gay-liberation activist Marsha P. Johnson. Readers will find it a relief, after the book’s harrowing beginning, to see that Plasse-Taylor later found and accepted various forms of love and pursued a successful career in design and as a professor and activist, although the first two-thirds of the memoir are the most engrossing. The author’s prose is earnest and introspective, weaving the darkest moments of his upbringing with joyous passages about New York City’s 1980s queer nightlife scene and, later, about his students. The memoir makes the case that, just as the interior of a space must be revealed to be designed, so must we uncover ourselves and accept the flawed humans we are: “It took me a hell of a lot of years to look in the mirror and not see a mask, reflected, back.”
A moving examination of personal trauma and the healing power of queer community.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 257
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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