An engaging cautionary tale; those who’ve had their own relationship struggles will relate and may even realize that they...
A debut memoir focusing on a woman’s troubled marriages.
Van Sant’s memoir opens with her in jail. She believes she’s being charged with aggravated battery, but at the sentencing hearing, she learns she’s being charged with attempted murder. While she lets readers know that the victim is an ex-husband, she saves the rest of the details for later. After describing her desperate situation in jail, Van Sant recounts her life story, beginning with a somewhat troubled childhood thanks in part to her alcoholic father. A pregnancy at age 20 helped spur her into marrying her boyfriend. Having never cooked a meal or washed a load of laundry, the young wife found herself in over her head, but it was her husband’s habit of sowing his wild oats that brought about the marriage’s end. For the author, that began a pattern of marriages that didn’t work out. Abuse, both mental and physical, men who rely on her to pay the bills, and an ex-husband who kidnaps their infant daughter and runs away to Canada are just some of the issues with which she had to contend. Thanks to Van Sant’s colorful life and the characters she ends up marrying, the memoir is free of dull moments. While readers will likely cringe at some of the decisions she made, including the one that landed her in jail, she remains a sympathetic figure whom readers will want to see find the right path. The occasional clunky sentence and some interesting word choices interrupt the memoir’s conversational style. For instance, several times the word “rotated” is used in place of “turned”—“As she entered our living room, he rotated to the three of us”—and some sentences have a lawyerly ring to them: “The holidays soon arrived with no favorable result in regards to my marriage.” Nevertheless, the strong narrative voice and the compelling story overcome these distractions.
An engaging cautionary tale; those who’ve had their own relationship struggles will relate and may even realize that they don’t have it as bad as they thought.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492378846
Page Count: 214
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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