A tender, astute remembrance of overcoming grief and coming to terms with a parent’s flaws.
In this debut memoir, a father’s death reunites a mother and daughter but reignites familial tensions.
Gay remembers with precise detail the moment that her father was escorted out of her family’s Florida house, strapped to a stretcher. It was 1963, and the author was 18 years old, home from college for Thanksgiving. Gay’s father had suffered a mental breakdown that would forever change the family dynamic. For years to follow, her dad underwent treatment, including electroshock therapy, and was in and out of hospitals. Later, in the 1990s, while on sabbatical from her professorship in upstate New York, Gay flew down to Florida to spend time with her mother while her father spent his final days in assisted living. The author, the youngest child in a family with three other siblings, attempted to pick up the pieces of her fractured family after her father’s death and help her ailing mother. She came to recognize her mother’s hardships throughout her life—as a young child abandoned by both parents, and as a wife in a challenging marriage—and attempted to rebuild her relationships with her siblings. Meanwhile, her mother dealt with her grief by drinking and closing herself off from her children. Gay is a perceptive and compassionate narrator who manages to explore the gaps in everyone’s stories, including her own. As an English scholar and professor, she demonstrates a firm knowledge of how memoirs can be unreliable records of the past. She uses poetry, journal entries, and literary epigraphs to create an engaging metanarrative that explores how writing was vital to her process of overcoming trauma. She also writes of how she took on the task of breaking “the cycle of family dysfunction” and continued to reach out to her siblings after their mother’s death.
A tender, astute remembrance of overcoming grief and coming to terms with a parent’s flaws.Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-874-3
Page Count: 168
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
© 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.
