A well-balanced, soul-searching family memoir with broad appeal.
In this LGBTQ memoir, a teacher and activist relates the changes, challenges, and joys of her marriage to a trans-identified psychotherapist/rock ’n’ roller.
“The first time I ever saw Katy, she was wearing a full beard and a prosthetic man-chest with perfectly molded pecs and sculpted abs,” begins this memoir. Schilt was attracted to Katy Koonce but not yet ready to come out. The two finally connected in group therapy, “a strange place to start a relationship,” but it had some advantages: “Before we ever spent a moment alone together, Katy knew that I was a depression-prone approval seeker….I knew that Katy was a former drug addict with hepatitis C” and also a therapist herself. Both had trouble with body image, Schilt from growing up with “compulsive dieters” and Koonce, who is transgender, from experiencing gender dysphoria. In Part I, Schilt describes the couple’s courtship, marriage, and birth of their child Waylon, ending with Koonce’s much-desired final chest reconstruction. Part II turns to Koonce’s treatment for hepatitis C, which weakened her and required much caretaking while Schilt was also looking after their young son. This left Schilt feeling bruised; Part III examines how she learned to stand up for her own needs and began writing. What makes Schilt’s engaging work stand out in today’s crowded memoir field is how well she avoids its besetting sins, self-pity and melodrama. Her wry humor, hard-won insights, and appreciation of eccentricity come through instead, as when she describes Donna, Koonce’s force-of-nature mother: “Saying your prayers to the moon is pretty risqué stuff in a town where the Baptists still believe that Methodists go to hell.” Especially absorbing is seeing how Koonce’s illness forced Schilt to change. “All of my life, I’d been waiting for permission,” she writes. She had to deliberately “practice acting as entitled and taking up as much space as Katy,” which she found agonizing at first. Activism, a faith community that fit, and motherhood all contributed to her growth as well, described with lively clarity.
A well-balanced, soul-searching family memoir with broad appeal.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9860844-3-0
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Transgress Press
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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