Perceptive, thoughtful—and thought-provoking—with abundant moments of insight.
Intensely personal essays explore autobiography as a means of creative self-examination.
Foster (All the Lost Girls, 2000) organizes these pieces, most of which have previously been published in various anthologies and literary magazines, into three sections: “Inside the Girls’ Room,” “Inside the Writing Room,” and “Inside My Skin.” Or so the table of contents indicates. The actual arrangement bears little resemblance to the proposed structure, which seems to have been an attempt to form a cohesive whole out of essays written at different times in the author’s life. No matter. Their unity of theme persists regardless of their placement here. The author looks closely at what it means to be a southerner, to be white, to be middle-class, and to be a woman in the various roles that that implies. She examines how her life has been shaped by her genteel upbringing in a small southern town where girls were expected to be charming. Ambition, she admits, “swam through my bloodstream like a virus,” and she puzzled over how to pursue it without relinquishing feminine charm. After college and a failed marriage, she returned to her parents’ home in Alabama in her 20s, conflicted and confused. Fleeing the South, where she didn’t fit in, Foster moved to Los Angeles, attempted for a while to write fiction, and then moved to Iowa, where she discovered that writing autobiography was her métier, a way to tell her own story and probe her own identity. One of her most effective pieces, “Skin,” tells of trying to teach memoir writing to a class of 20 people in a storefront library in Tuskegee, a small town in Alabama’s Black Belt. Foster, who arrived believing that autobiographical writing would somehow magically bring people closer to themselves as well as to each other, feels anxious, awkward, and terribly conscious of her whiteness. By the second day the class has shrunk to six, and the writing lesson becomes a lesson in racism.
Perceptive, thoughtful—and thought-provoking—with abundant moments of insight.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-8203-2688-7
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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
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