A searingly honest memoir of faith, sexuality and motherhood.
A travel and fitness journalist’s account of her struggles to reconcile strong Catholic beliefs with both homosexuality and motherhood.
In a narrative that deftly moves between past and present, Theall tells the moving story of how she found self-acceptance as a lesbian mother of faith. The black sheep in a strict Roman Catholic household, she knew that “God had made [her] a girl,” but that didn’t stop her from arm-wrestling the boys in school and wishing that she could be like her Happy Days hero, the Fonz. Living in small-town Texas didn’t help matters. Neither did living near her best friend’s father, a man who raped her when she was 11. So when the family moved to Dallas, she was thrilled. But she was still an outsider, even in the big city. To escape the pain of being different, Theall joined the track team and bonded with a coach she later discovered was lesbian. She knew that Catholicism condemned all forms of homosexual love, but she also realized that the coach and her partner were “a refuge.” Despite the experience of a lesbian relationship in college, Theall remained conflicted about her sexual identity until she was nearly 30. Acceptance from her family, especially her mother, remained incomplete and came with great difficulty. But the greatest challenge would come later, after she had settled down with her partner to raise an adopted son. The same church that had caused her to feel so much shame tried to force her child out of the Catholic-run school due to her lesbianism. In the journey away from Catholicism and the need for maternal approval that followed, Theall eventually found peace. She also came to understand that the “raging love” between her and her mother was part of what made them “something more.”
A searingly honest memoir of faith, sexuality and motherhood.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9729-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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