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MOTHERLINES

Name: MOTHERLINES
Author: Patricia Reis
ISBN: 978-1-63152-121-8

LOVE, LONGING, AND LIBERATION

by Patricia Reis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2016

A spiritual autobiography especially strong in showing the importance of women as guides.

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)