A spiritual autobiography especially strong in showing the importance of women as guides.
In this memoir, a psychotherapist recounts how she found meaning in her life through growth as a sexual being, creative artist, and spiritual individual.
Reis (Daughters of Saturn, 2006, etc.), born in 1940, writes that her memoir is “about making meaning at midlife,” a more difficult undertaking for women than the culture acknowledges. Reis looks at concerns like sex, money, meaningful work, partnership, and—crucially—her “place in a female lineage that was my birthright as a woman.” Her relationship with her mother, as well as correspondence and visits over many years with Ruth, a nun and Reis’ aunt, forms an important thread throughout the book. Reis’ dreams become another significant theme. After a degree in English literature, two illegal abortions, three marriages, and three divorces by her late 30s, she entered an MFA program in art at UCLA, financed by a large settlement from a divorce. This would allow her to pursue reading, world travel, artmaking, writing, feminist scholarship, vision quests, and a second master’s degree, in 1984, in depth psychology. Reis lived briefly “as a New Age nun” and a lesbian; in 1985, she met Jim Harrod, a psychotherapist and scholar of philosophical theology. They felt deeply connected, and she moved to Maine, Harrod’s home, where she began her psychotherapy practice. The two had an unofficial marriage ceremony in 1987. Over her life’s course, Reis concludes she was her “own still-unfolding revelation.” In presenting her story, the author speaks to women looking for a model of a life’s journey—not the hero’s journey so familiar from writers like Joseph Campbell, but a woman’s spiraling, reflective, meditative path, one that fully acknowledges relationships, community, and love. Many readers should be able to relate to her candidly reported explorations. But Reis doesn’t always fully acknowledge her privilege and agency. Of the hefty divorce settlement, she asks: “What price can be put on lost dreams?” And she describes euthanizing her two aging but healthy “country dogs” on moving to Los Angeles as a “loss” demanded of her, not a choice.
A spiritual autobiography especially strong in showing the importance of women as guides.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-121-8
Page Count: 360
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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