by Ralph Plumb Feager Pertilla ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 2017
Will resonate among readers responsible for aging parents.
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Two friends recount their individual experiences caring for their elderly mothers (both mothers are in their 90s) in a slim, debut volume that reveals varying attitudes toward the challenges of dealing with the changing relationships between parents and adult children.
Plumb is an only child, bearing full responsibility for his mother. Pertilla is the youngest of three daughters and benefits from a division of labor among the siblings. Plumb also arrives with unresolved conflicts—his mother has always refused to tell him who his birth father is: “You have 100 percent of my genes, which has nothing to do with him,” she says. But both must come to the rescue when the frailties of old age smack up against the normal obstacles of everyday life. Plumb’s mother hears “suspicious” noises from the neighbors, which leads him to spend several nights at her apartment. Pertilla’s mother calls her at work with an “emergency” when she forgets how to work the TV remote control. The conversational-style prose employed by both authors lends a comforting, group-therapy quality to the text, a successful literary safe zone in which they reveal their own personal moments of discomfort—Plumb’s embarrassment when taking his mother shopping for new underwear; Pertilla’s shock as she learns her mother has secretly prepackaged her urine sample for the doctor. It’s this sharing of their experiences that helps Plumb, especially, move past considerable anger to acceptance and, finally, an expression of his love for his mother. Pertilla, identifying more closely with her mother, has greater insight into Mama’s perspective: “It’s easy [for me] to remember how difficult it can be for such a speedy woman to be slowed down by age...how hard it must be for an active little bee...who is used to helping others, now to wait for others to help her.” Overall, the book serves as an honest presentation that is less a guide than a supportive acknowledgement and validation of emotional turmoil.
Will resonate among readers responsible for aging parents.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-7627-0
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Helen Fremont ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2020
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
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BOOK REVIEW
by Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
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
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by Laura Schroff & Alex Tresniowski ; illustrated by Barry Root
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