A wrenchingly lyrical memoir of family and tragedy.
A novelist and poet tells the fragmented story of how she came to terms with the suicides of her father and then her mother.
The memoir opens with an 18-year-old McBride (The Fire Opal, 2012, etc.) in a psychiatric hospital struggling to cope with the deaths of her parents. Moving back and forth through time, the author examines her past in an attempt to understand it and the parents who shaped it. The daughter of two Irish Catholic parents who “lov[ed] and miss[ed]” an Ireland they had never seen, McBride bore witness to the traumatic disintegration of her family over time. The problems began when her father, Vincent, did not get the well-paying job he and McBride’s mother, Barbara, expected. The family was forced to move out of the big house in Yonkers that her parents had bought in expectation of Vincent’s success. They traveled to Santa Fe along with McBride’s senile, often cruel grandmother Nanny. Meanwhile, Vincent continued to struggle professionally. Unable to advance in his career, he took a second job as a bartender and began to drift into alcoholism while Barbara became increasingly unstable and Nanny more demented and embittered. After Nanny’s death, the situation between McBride’s parents only worsened, with Barbara threatening suicide and becoming more violent toward her husband, who eventually shot himself. Five months later, Barbara shot herself as well and “died without a face.” Haunted both literally and figuratively by her parents’ ghosts, McBride eventually sold everything she owned and moved to Ireland, where she was determined to live and make peace with her parents and her past. Harrowing yet beautiful, the book is not only an exploration of the interplay between memory and imagination. It is also an eloquent meditation on the painful burdens of the past that parents bequeath their children.
A wrenchingly lyrical memoir of family and tragedy.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941040-43-0
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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