Jong-Fast is the Joan Rivers for slackers: she delights in pushing the boundaries of libel only to retreat, all in the...
From the author of the debut novel Normal Girl (2000): shallow, neurotic, very funny essays that continue to milk the writer’s relations to famous mother Erica Jong and grandfather Howard Fast.
“I knew I was going to have to prostitute this experience,” Jong-Fast acknowledges by way of mock apology for dishing the dirt on the famous people she encounters during her years of growing up, “and pretty much everything else that’s ever happened to me.” Straightaway, she dispenses with niceties: she loves lying, is “mildly maladjusted,” greedy for publicity, “somewhat self-obsessed,” and shamelessly devoted to name-dropping, especially dropping her own family’s names if that can win her food or flattery. When she first meets the new girl and future supermodel Sophie Dahl at the tony Manhattan Day School, her opening line is “Do you know who my mom is?” Some of the sacred cows Jong-Fast relishes butchering include her grandfather Howie (a novelist jailed in the ’50s for refusing to name names before HUAC; now, in his eighties, he’s marrying his forty-year-old secretary—“The bride wore a white suit. The groom wore Depends”); the various unsavory boyfriends of her mother, the so-called Queen of Erotica; the shrinks her mother employed to help the husky Molly slim down; and family friend Joan Collins, who commits the horrific faux pas of announcing that thirteen-year-old Molly was “too fat to go on Valentino’s yacht,” thus ensuring ten more years of therapy. Jong-Fast is sarcastic but not stupid, and she wields an acid pen—the “muumuu-wearing fascist” psychiatrist to the stars who helps her lose weight is dubbed “Adolf Hitler,” and one in the succession of dubious secretaries for her mom at their home on East 94th Street is “Marie Osmond,” for her “incredible value system.”
Jong-Fast is the Joan Rivers for slackers: she delights in pushing the boundaries of libel only to retreat, all in the spirit of good clean fun. After all, what else does she have to write about?Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6144-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt and haunting memoir just right for the current political and social climate.
An acclaimed Mexican-born poet’s account of the sometimes-overwhelming struggles he and his parents faced in their quest to become American citizens.
Hernandez Castillo (Cenzontle, 2018, etc.) first came to the United States with his undocumented Mexican parents in 1993. But life in the shadows came at a high price. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided their home on multiple occasions and eventually deported the author’s father back to Mexico. In this emotionally raw memoir, Hernandez Castillo explores his family’s traumas through a fractured narrative that mirrors their own fragmentation. Of his own personal experiences, he writes, “when I came undocumented to the U.S., I crossed into a threshold of invisibility.” To protect himself against possible identification as an undocumented person, he excelled in school and learned English “better than any white person, any citizen.” When he was old enough to work, he created a fake social security card to apply for the jobs that helped him support his fatherless family. After high school, he attended college and married a Mexican American woman. He became an MFA student at the University of Michigan and qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allowed him to visit his father in Mexico, where he discovered the depth of his cultural disorientation. Battling through ever present anxiety, the author revisited his and his parents’ origins and then returned to take on the difficult interview that qualified him for a green card. His footing in the U.S. finally solidified, Hernandez Castillo unsuccessfully attempted to help his father and mother qualify for residency in the U.S. Only after his father was kidnapped by members of a drug cartel was the author able to help his mother, whose life was now in danger, seek asylum in the U.S. Honest and unsparing, this book offers a detailed look at the dehumanizing immigration system that shattered the author’s family while offering a glimpse into his own deeply conflicted sense of what it means to live the so-called American dream.
A heartfelt and haunting memoir just right for the current political and social climate.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-282559-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Lionel Dahmer, father of mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, here writes one of the most courageous, unsensational books ever written about serial murder. It does not even summarize Jeffrey's crimes. Dahmer takes upon himself much of the guilt for his son's acts by considering a genetic predisposition to murder he may have passed on to his son; various acts of his own moral blindness that may have contributed to his son's deprived emotional being; and things he did and didn't do when certain symptoms appeared that might have alerted him to Jeffrey's lust for sexual atrocity. What parts of the father, the book asks, are replicated in the son? Largely, Jeffrey is a failure whose failings were earlier those of his father, though the father overcame each failing as its pain grew. Intellectually and physically inferior as a child, Lionel was tutored by his parents from first grade on, and by dint of hard study earned a doctorate in chemistry. A puny child, he took up body-building as a teenager and turned himself into a fine physical specimen. But he also had murderous dreams from which he would awake trembling. Jeffrey's mother was also a depressive, and her excessive pill-taking during pregnancy may well have damaged Jeffrey's genes. As a child, he developed a testicular hernia that, when treated by surgery, gave him a fear of castration and seemed to lead into lasting withdrawal from his family and friendships and, by the time he was 15, into alcoholism and a liking for dead things. Lionel sees Jeffrey's main psychotic trigger lying in a need to control: his own need for intellectual and physical control resulted in a glass wall between himself and Jeffrey; Jeffrey's need for control grew into a need for drugged or dead lovers who submitted to him absolutely. Clear, modest, intelligent—and extremely disturbing.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-12156-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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