The heartwarming story of a writer’s discovery that the aging process—and life in general—can be tragic and wondrous, all at...
A touching debut memoir about a middle-aged woman charged with caring for both her aging father and her two growing children.
Sullivan’s story begins at a time when she was in a particularly tough spot: her mother had died, her father had suffered a stroke, and her husband had filed for divorce. Rather than wallow in grief or self-pity, the author decided to do something that just felt good, so she moved from Indiana to sunny Anna Maria Island, Florida, where her parents had owned a beach cottage for decades. The idea seemed like an idyllic escape and a flawless plan—except for the fact that her father, who needed constant care, wanted to go with her, and her Indiana-based siblings wouldn’t hear of it. But Sullivan decided to go anyway, packing up her kids and her dad and heading to the Gulf of Mexico. The memoir tracks her subsequent adventures in Florida, where she lived through hurricanes, floods, and plenty of long-distance spats with siblings. It also chronicles the slow decline of her father, who later suffered from dementia and cancer. Overall, Sullivan’s book is a tender tribute to a man she regarded as a kind father and beloved grandparent. It also provides a moving picture of the ways that the family made their ailing patriarch’s final years adventurous and fun, such as by taking a family vacation to Ireland. The author deftly examines the drama of complicated family dynamics and provides an accurate picture of what it’s like to be a member of the so-called “sandwich generation,” caring for both children and parents. One of the strongest aspects of Sullivan’s memoir is the way she beautifully describes caring for a parent with dementia: “His senility was like water rushing through my fingers; I couldn’t grab hold of it, understand it, manage it at all….[T]he dementia came and went without an itinerary. We just had to follow along and do the best we could.”
The heartwarming story of a writer’s discovery that the aging process—and life in general—can be tragic and wondrous, all at once.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940442-12-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Walrus Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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SEEN & HEARD
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
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