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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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
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