A searingly eloquent memoir.
A nonfiction writer offers an account of the devastating physical and emotional consequences a much-desired pregnancy had on her life.
Before the birth of her first daughter, May (The Map of Enough: One Woman's Search for Place, 2014) counted herself fortunate. Her body had come through pregnancy with “no swollen ankles, no blood pressure spike, no low iron, no infections, no complications at all.” But the birth also resulted in a gash that extended from her cervix to her vaginal opening, and she soon began to experience severe incontinence and mood swings that wrought havoc on her life and relationships. At times, she felt “mad,” like a “viper” ready to strike. Yet as distressing as these health changes were, they forced the author into a startling new awareness of her body. The “inconvenience” of menstruation was now something more sacred, an ancient restorative function that purged as it cleansed. It was also the thing that allowed women to go within and “connect with the unknown and unseen world.” Body awareness also caused May to re-evaluate her relationships with the women in her family, including her mother and newborn daughter. “We women carry each other—whether we want to or not, whether we plan to or not,” she writes. A doctor eventually diagnosed May with postpartum thyroiditis, hormone imbalance, pelvic floor disorder, and malfunctioning adrenals. As she struggled to come to terms with bodily limitation and the anger seething at its core, she realized that her experiences, though not unique, existed in a “cultural black hole” that was defined by the empty catchall term “postpartum depression.” In this raw and lyrical book, the author holds nothing back. From the blinding rages to the blackest emotional abysses, she records all with an eloquence that is both powerful and restorative. Ultimately, May came to understand that labor does not end with the birth of a child; it continues long afterward in the way a woman gives birth to herself as a mother and woman.
A searingly eloquent memoir.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61902-489-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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