A poignantly compelling memoir about family, mental health, and revisiting the past.
A public relations executive tells the story of her once-glamorous mother’s decline into mental illness.
Giles knew her mother, Carolyn Scott, as a free-spirited but socially isolated Long Island homemaker who was close to Grace Kelly. She also knew her as the woman who insisted to doctors that her youngest daughter was too sickly to attend school. Many years later, when the author saw a newspaper story about how her now homeless and mentally ill mother had been a bridesmaid at Kelly’s wedding, she realized that Carolyn’s early life was a mystery to her. Desperate for insight, Giles began to research her mother's past. Carolyn left her “hardscrabble hometown” in Ohio for New York City when she was 19. She took up residence at the famous Barbizon Hotel for women, where she met and befriended aspiring actress Kelly in 1947. Carolyn started modeling, eventually signing on with the then-fledgling Ford Modeling Agency. Though she married in 1949, she continued to model while Grace began a brief but spectacularly successful career as a film actress, which ended with her marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco. As she drew nearer to 30, Carolyn devoted herself to motherhood full-time. But after the traumatic C-section birth of her third and final child, she gradually withdrew into the distant, fragile figure of Giles’ memories. Only after consulting with doctors about the circumstances around that birth was the author able to ascertain the truth: though diagnosed with schizophrenia, Carolyn had in fact suffered from postpartum psychosis that had deteriorated over time. Giles suggests that because the condition was not well understood at that time, Carolyn would not have received proper care. But had treatment existed, recovery—and a normal life for her and family—would have been possible. Illustrated throughout with photos, the narrative celebrates a lifelong female friendship while shedding light on a powerful, if at times painful and complex, mother-daughter bond.
A poignantly compelling memoir about family, mental health, and revisiting the past.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-11549-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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
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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