Mom never quite comes into focus, but this moving portrait of a nontraditional family both educates and entertains.
A startlingly candid account of growing up with a father who changed from an undemonstrative, unhappy male to a warm, affectionate lesbian.
Here, the co-editor of Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Parents (not reviewed) weaves together her own and her parents’ sexual hopes, fears, and fantasies. When she interviewed her parents for this memoir, Dick Howey was, apparently, as open about his sexuality as Noelle is about hers. The result often reads like a breezy novel deepened by poignant and even painful passages. It was in 1986 that Dinah Howey told their daughter, who was then 14, about her father’s penchant for cross-dressing, swearing her to secrecy. Six months later, Dick moved out and gradually began a transformation that involved gender dysphoria counseling, estrogen injections, and learning to speak, write, and smile like a woman. While dealing with her father’s transgenderism, the author struggled with the task of developing her own identity. Fortunately, as Dick became more feminine, he also became more loving and open, radically altering a distant (verging on nonexistent) father-daughter relationship. By 1990, when Noelle was a college freshman, her amicably divorced parents jointly threw a coming-out party announcing to friends and colleagues that Dick was now Christine, and when Christine flew to Belgium for sex-change surgery in 1994, Noelle accompanied her. (“Dad” has now become “Da” in the text, and “he” and “him” are now “she” and “her.”) By book’s end, the author has become “best friends” with both her mother and her father. Christine, who briefly dated men, recognizes that she is a lesbian; Dinah is happily married to a testosterone-laden alpha male; Noelle has worked her way through some wrong boyfriends and recovered from a bout of clinical depression.
Mom never quite comes into focus, but this moving portrait of a nontraditional family both educates and entertains.Pub Date: May 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-26921-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
