A warmly candid memoir of navigating family, aging, and death.
A Canadian writer’s debut memoir about how she learned to cope with the houseful of mementos and memories her parents left after their deaths.
As the eldest of four children and the only daughter, Johnson became the main caretaker for her aging parents. She and her siblings watched over a period of 20 years as Alzheimer’s claimed their reserved British father and old age took their feisty American mother. Yet after her mother died, Johnson did not feel the relief she had expected. Instead she found herself “searching for evidence” of her mother and father. The author moved into her parents’ house to sort through their belongings. Almost immediately, she felt the deep emotional toll of her task of separating the “trash from the treasure.” Going through the possessions that had accumulated over combined lifetimes of “more than 180 years,” she realized the “layers of misunderstandings” that existed between herself and, in particular, her mother. Johnson gradually began tracing the trajectory of her parents’ lives. Her free-spirited mother had been a war bride who followed her husband to England, Singapore, and Canada. Growing up, she remembered how her order-loving, traditional father had stifled her mother’s artistic ambitions and possibly fueled the alcoholism for which he would make her feel guilty. Personal letters revealed that their difficult though long-lived union had been riven from the start by separation and opposing temperaments. Johnson learned that her parents’ marriage had ultimately been “a hard-fought achievement” both had consciously chosen. But perhaps even more significantly, she understood that the “intrusive, demanding, and possessive” person she knew as her mother was really a woman who wanted a closeness with her daughter that she had not shared with her own mother. Generous and heartfelt, Johnson’s book offers an intimate look at family and especially mother-daughter connections. It is an uplifting affirmation of human relationships and the cycle of life itself.
A warmly candid memoir of navigating family, aging, and death.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-18409-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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