A remarkable and daring work, a song of both family and self.
A new memoir from Flynn, showing a writer who refuses to be bound by the conventions of form.
Much like his previous work, Flynn’s latest is a collage that mixes narrative, reflection, literary and film criticism, fiction, fantasy, and ruthless self-interrogation. That it works should surprise no one familiar with the author; he has an uncommonly nuanced voice and sensibility, and he holds little back. Flynn begins with his young daughter and a story he has told her “about a man who lived in the woods behind my grandmother’s house.” He quickly admits, “obviously there’s a lot I leave out of the stories I tell my daughter.” Here, that includes his own marital infidelity, the story of which comes framed (emotionally, at any rate) by a set of revelations about his mother, who burned down the family house when Flynn was 6 years old. The fallout of that event runs throughout like a vein of ore, casting everything that follows in its dancing light. “John Cassavetes once proposed,” writes the author, “that when a character can’t find his way home, that’s where the story begins.” Certainly, that’s the case here. Unraveling his past in a series of short prose fragments, jumping around in time, Flynn excavates his history from an angle, as if he can’t bear to look at it head-on. Yet, as the book progresses, the author reveals nearly everything, from his mother’s suicide to the slow build of his affair with a woman who lived 1,500 miles away. For Flynn, there is a line connecting these events, an attempt to exert some sort of chaotic control. “Maybe my mother set the fire to find that sense of control as well,” he writes about their shared sense of complicity. Memoir is a genre of complicity, a form that thrives on questions and filling in the gaps, especially when information is conjectural or scant. Flynn plunges headlong into such a territory, endowing his book with a palpable sense of risk.
A remarkable and daring work, a song of both family and self.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00554-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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