For funeral-home-cum-dysfunctional-family tales, stick with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (June 2006).
An uneven first memoir offers more undigested anger than wisdom.
Holloway was fixated on death from a young age. Her friend Julie’s parents owned a funeral home, and Holloway liked to sneak into her favorite coffin, lined with pink silk, and imagine her own funeral. Kids with happy childhoods, of course, don’t spend much time thinking about their funerals, and Holloway’s interest in death is something of an escape from her horrible family life. Holloway’s father is abusive, sometimes beating his wife so brutally that the kids fear for her life. Eventually, Holloway’s mother summons some resolve, signs up for college classes and kicks her husband out. But Holloway does not offer the expected my-mother-is-a-phoenix line. No, mom turns out to be thoroughly self-absorbed, and deeply limited in her ability to love her children. Besotted with her new boyfriend, she virtually abandons her daughter, leaving her to make her way through adolescence on her own: “Can’t you be happy for me?” mom asks her teenage daughter. “Why is everything about you? . . . I’ve done you my whole life. This is about me.” Sections of this memoir are eerily lovely, but the overall narrative doesn’t hold together. The funerary imagery that suffuses the opening chapters feels distractingly like a device, a symbol that, in the final analysis, doesn’t have much to do with the family drama. The final third of the book, in which an adult Holloway finally reckons with her childhood, seems like an entirely different book—the voice is different, and the elegant prose of the beginning is replaced by clichés (“Sobs finally came. I didn’t think they ever would”) and self-help psycho-babble (“There was no other way for her to recover but to let the memories come, and I couldn’t do that for her”).
For funeral-home-cum-dysfunctional-family tales, stick with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (June 2006).Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 1-4169-4002-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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