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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
