An important memoir about romantic/sexual addiction and the potential cures…if it’s accurate.
X-rated memoir by novelist Resnick (Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick, 1999).
Sliding toward 50, the author takes stock of a life so sordid and filled with so much need that almost every page overflows with sadness and desperation. Her father Henry, a well-educated librarian portrayed as a weak man unable to stand up to his successive wives, left the house when Resnick was four. He never completely abandoned his daughter, yet never completely embraced her either. Her mother Jane, who committed suicide when the author was 14, also suffered from romantic addiction, compounded by substance abuse. As a result, Jane lost custody of Rachel and her baby brother. They kicked around, separately, from one living situation to another. Resnick’s partly Jewish heritage frequently complicated those living situations as well as her personal sense of identity. Not completely destitute, she attended Yale and showed promise as a writer. Her destructive relationships with men, however, frequently compromised the quality of her work, whether as an author or as a private investigator. At one low point, past age 40 and wanting to have a baby, Resnick became intentionally pregnant by one of her abusive lovers. She lost the hoped-for child early in the pregnancy, adding new velocity to her downward spiral. In the past five years, the author declares, she has begun to heal, thanks to 12-step programs and a healthy romantic/sexual relationship with a tender woman rather than an abusive man. Resnick’s prose is memorable, the situations she describes unforgettable—and both are frequently graphic. Unfortunately, the writer fails to inform readers whether she is using real names or pseudonyms, whether she has done anything to verify her memories and whether she has created composite characters—glaring omissions in an era of warranted suspicion about the accuracy of memoirs.
An important memoir about romantic/sexual addiction and the potential cures…if it’s accurate.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59691-494-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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