A soundly researched and lucidly written survey of the daily emotional experience of mothers, fathers, and adolescents in 55 European-American working- and middle-class families. The book is based on an innovative study in which fathers, mothers, and teenagers were equipped with beepers that went off at regular intervals throughout the day, at which point they stopped whatever they were doing to record their activities and feelings. This procedure allowed Larson (Human Development and Family Studies/Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) and Richards (Psychology/Loyola Univ.) to explore the connections between the family's interactions and each member's emotional experience outside the family. The authors found that families with adolescents were healthier when mothers' lives outside the home (school, career, social life, etc.) were richer and when fathers' work was less stressful. Larson and Richards observe from the study's results that the traditionally gendered roles of parents can hinder them from adapting smoothly to a child's transition into adolescence. A mother who identifies too strongly with her maternal role may complicate her teen's need to separate. The father's traditional insistence on maintaining authority insults a teenager's growing need to have more control over his or her own life. Yet at the same time, teens are becoming particularly aware of their own feelings and needs to feel understood by the adults in their lives, needs that are further frustrated by a father's emotional distance. The more both parents' behavior, especially the father's, deviates from narrowly defined gender roles, Larson and Richards find, the better their relationships with their adolescents tend to be. A valuable contribution to family studies, this is also a sensible and creative survival manual for parents of adolescents as well as mental health professionals who counsel families.
Pub Date: June 29, 1994
ISBN: 0-465-01662-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Basic
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
Categories: FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
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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. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
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BOOK REVIEW
Ruminations and reminiscences of an author—now in his 70s—about fatherhood, writing, and death.
O’Brien (July, July, 2002, etc.), who achieved considerable literary fame with both Going After Cacciato (1978) and The Things They Carried (1990), returns with an eclectic assembly of pieces that grow increasingly valedictory as the idea of mortality creeps in. (The title comes from the author’s uncertainty about his ability to assemble these pieces in a single volume.) He begins and ends with a letter: The initial one is to his first son (from 2003); the terminal one, to his two sons, both of whom are now teens (the present). Throughout the book, there are a number of recurring sections: “Home School” (lessons for his sons to accomplish), “The Magic Show” (about his long interest in magic), and “Pride” (about his feelings for his sons’ accomplishments). O’Brien also writes often about his own father. One literary figure emerges as almost a member of the family: Ernest Hemingway. The author loves Hemingway’s work (except when he doesn’t) and often gives his sons some of Papa’s most celebrated stories to read and think and write about. Near the end is a kind of stand-alone essay about Hemingway’s writings about war and death, which O’Brien realizes is Hemingway’s real subject. Other celebrated literary figures pop up in the text, including Elizabeth Bishop, Andrew Marvell, George Orwell, and Flannery O’Connor. Although O’Brien’s strong anti-war feelings are prominent throughout, his principal interest is fatherhood—specifically, at becoming a father later in his life and realizing that he will miss so much of his sons’ lives. He includes touching and amusing stories about his toddler sons, about the sadness he felt when his older son became a teen and began to distance himself, and about his anguish when his sons failed at something.
A miscellany of paternal pride (and frustration) darkened by the author’s increasing realizations of his mortality.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-618-03970-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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