An uplifting, unconventional, and deeply imaginative remembrance.
A communications executive with debilitating pain finds comfort and self-understanding in fairy tales in this memoir.
In 1993, after Tocher injured her back, she was forced to close her Toronto-based communications firm. She suffered for a further seven years with chronic pain without successful treatment, and she was on the brink of what she calls “dangerous depression” when she chose an unconventional way to help herself. Tocher’s interest in fairy tales was first piqued in 1981 after she attended a storytelling event featuring Irish bard Alice Kane. She developed such a great love for the wisdom in such stories that she looked to the folklore genre for solace in her time of need. In these pages, she focuses particularly on retelling stories of tower princesses, such as Rapunzel, while drawing parallels between their plights and her own: “Chronic pain had put me in a tower, and I often described my body as a prison of bones.” Tocher introduces the reader to a world of mythical creatures—such as fairy godmothers, gnomes, and dragons—which inform her inner world, while also reporting “concurrent events” of her “outer life.” As the author battles with the pain of what was later diagnosed as fibromyalgia, she draws upon the “radical, restorative power” of old, overlooked stories and ultimately finds comfort in this “mirror world.” Along the way, this memoir tantalizingly skirts the gossamer divide between fantasy and reality, as when the author describes visions she had, such as one of Mother Earth prostrate and unconscious.
Tocher’s approach to storytelling effectively captures the playfulness of classic fairy tales but adds a contemporary zing. For example, here’s her description of a character named Gothel, whom some readers may know from the Disney film Tangled: “Dame Gothel is in a real funk. She sits in her parlor on her massive walnut chair, holding her knobby knees to her chest….She bites her nails and mutters to herself, her eyes searching the room, searching everywhere.” Tocher’s writing style recaptures the delight of hearing timeless stories as a child but also delivers a thoughtful and deeply personal close reading of such tales and their philosophical messages: “I was Dame Gothel…trying to force natural things into models of perfection that they themselves couldn’t possibly attain.” The memoir also shares simple but timely advice, as in a passage told in the voice of a fairy godmother: “Do not get caught between the mirrors. You cannot be one person on the inside and another on the outside.” Some readers may consider such fantastical elements in a memoir to be a way of evading the truth. But it this case, readers learn a great deal about Tocher’s deepest hopes and dreams through her fairy-story interpretations, which she employs as a “mirror for the soul.” This book does not purport to remedy physical pain, but it does demonstrate how fairy tales can help promote self-understanding and lighten one’s emotional burden—and it’s a true joy to read as it does so.
An uplifting, unconventional, and deeply imaginative remembrance.Pub Date: May 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9738776-0-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wonderlit Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
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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