A raw and eloquently unflinching memoir.
An Oakland-based writer and editor tells the story of a passionate but co-dependent long-term affair that ended her marriage and became the “disease” that nearly destroyed her.
Aron was a teenager just out of high school when she first met K, a man in his 20s, in San Francisco. Newly arrived from New Jersey, she had come to California to “[collect] experiences” and escape a home life that, though loving, had also become chaotic. Their romance, which K ended, lasted only a few months, but it left her feeling “sick with [a] love” she never forgot. Aron eventually returned to the East Coast to attend college and deal with the fallout surrounding a drug-addicted sister and a mother who could not disconnect from that sister’s dramas. She then went to graduate school at Harvard, where she met the “tawny, rangy, beautiful boy” who became her partner. They moved to Berkeley, where they married and had a son. Yet despite her good fortune, the author could not “outrun my own sadness,” much of which stemmed from witnessing people she loved struggle with addiction and codependence. Diagnosed with both major depressive disorder and dysthymia, she found herself forced to confront the fact that marriage had transformed “hot, young, carefree love” into a prison. As she desperately attempted to understand and embrace her life, K suddenly reappeared, this time on Facebook, and they began a friendship that quickly developed into an affair. Discovering she was pregnant, Aron tried and ultimately failed to reconcile with her husband. She and K then began a relationship in which she soon found herself not only fighting with him about substance abuse problems, but sometimes partaking in and even funding K’s addictions. Interwoven throughout with meditations on desire, caretaking, and the role of early feminists like Carrie Nation in the modern temperance movement, the narrative offers dramatic and compelling insight into Aron’s struggles with codependency as it complicates the relationship among femininity, feminism, and enabling.
A raw and eloquently unflinching memoir.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-57667-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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 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
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