The latest installment in the author’s Brief Lives series is dedicated to the popular British novelist Wilkie Collins (1824-1889).
Uber-prolific biographer and novelist Ackroyd (Alfred Hitchcock, 2015, etc.) calls Collins the "sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists." His fictional London was one of "confused identities, both sexual and social, in which no one had a secure home." Thanks to his accomplished painter father, Collins' home life was very secure; his first book was a biography of his dad. Ackroyd begins by describing Collins' "peculiar" appearance. He was shortish, as were his arms and legs, and his head was large and had a noticeable bump on one side. Ackroyd thinks the attention that Collins always draws to his characters' physical abnormalities can be traced back to his own. He was also plagued throughout his life by frequent pains in his face and eyes and became addicted to laudanum early on. He went to law school but never practiced. His knowledge of the law, however, was put to good use in his novels, and Collins and Charles Dickens became close friends and collaborators. Dickens' magazines published some of Collins' works, and they acted together in plays each had written. Collins’ first published novel, Antonia, about pagan Rome, which Ackroyd calls "essentially hokum," sold well. Other workmanlike novels—plot and suspense were his strengths—followed, but the 1860s brought him massive popularity and sales. Ackroyd makes a strong case for reading (and rereading) the masterpieces from this period: the "elaborate and ingenious" The Woman in White, his "greatest" novel, and the innovative, influential The Moonstone, the "paradigm of the detective story." He also resuscitates and rescues from obscurity some of Collins' lesser-known works, such as No Name and Armadale.
A compact, pithy, and generous biography of a novelist who found great success despite writing in the age of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53739-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
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More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The debut memoir from the pop and fashion star.
Early on, Simpson describes the book she didn’t write: “a motivational manual telling you how to live your best life.” Though having committed to the lucrative deal years before, she “walked away,” fearing any sort of self-help advice she might give would be hypocritical. Outwardly, Simpson was at the peak of her success, with her fashion line generating “one billion dollars in annual sales.” However, anxiety was getting the better of her, and she admits she’d become a “feelings addict,” just needing “enough noise to distract me from the pain I’d been avoiding since childhood. The demons of traumatic abuse that refused to let me sleep at night—Tylenol PM at age twelve, red wine and Ambien as a grown, scared woman. Those same demons who perched on my shoulder, and when they saw a man as dark as them, leaned in to my ear to whisper, ‘Just give him your light. See if it saves him…’ ” On Halloween 2017, Simpson hit rock bottom, and, with the intervention of her devoted friends and husband, began to address her addictions and underlying fears. In this readable but overlong narrative, the author traces her childhood as a Baptist preacher’s daughter moving 18 times before she “hit fifth grade,” and follows her remarkable rise to fame as a singer. She reveals the psychological trauma resulting from years of sexual abuse by a family friend, experiences that drew her repeatedly into bad relationships with men, most publicly with ex-husband Nick Lachey. Admitting that she was attracted to the validating power of an audience, Simpson analyzes how her failings and triumphs have enabled her to take control of her life, even as she was hounded by the press and various music and movie executives about her weight. Simpson’s memoir contains plenty of personal and professional moments for fans to savor.
An eye-opening glimpse into the attempted self-unmaking of one of Hollywood’s most recognizable talents.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-289996-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
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