A thoroughly entertaining and affecting remembrance.
A man recounts the depths of addiction and the miracles of recovery in this debut memoir.
“I had my first drink at the age of six.” So begins Preston’s account of his long descent into alcoholism and drug dependency. From this first taste of a partially consumed glass of whiskey at a family Christmas party in 1970, Preston was immediately hooked: “It opened my eyes in a way they had never been opened.” The book describes the curious coming-of-age moments in the life of a young addict: buying Champale from a diner as a junior high school student, imitating singer Barry White’s deep voice in order to pass for an adult; smoking marijuana and drinking malt liquor while waiting for the school bus; and getting an A on a test during his first semester of college while using cocaine, then failing out two semesters later—while using more cocaine. Preston later got a job at an insurance company, had a daughter out of wedlock, discovered crack cocaine, and got arrested. The author encountered the very worst that addiction had to offer during a decadeslong struggle that saw him in and out of jobs, relationships, prison, hospitals, and rehabilitation centers, and involved in all manner of scams. Eventually, he says, he became a person that he could no longer recognize, love, or respect. Despite this, he managed to clean up his life, find peace, and live to tell the tale. Preston is a talented storyteller and a fine writer with an endearing sense of humor and a great memory for detail. The way he writes about drugs, in particular, is compelling—and interestingly, he writes about popular music in much the same way. For instance, he describes the work of the funk-rock band Parliament-Funkadelic thusly: “This stuff was raw like sushi and I craved it more and more.” The author manages to accomplish the difficult task of writing about addiction in a lively way, and despite the fact that he confesses to legitimately horrible things, he manages to keep readers on his side. Preston crafts a sympathetic, honest, and satisfying tale of despair and redemption.
A thoroughly entertaining and affecting remembrance.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9977906-0-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.
A collection of affirmations, noncloying and often provocative, about the things that make justice worth fighting for and life worth living.
Gay—a poet whose last book, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, bears the semantically aligned title Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015)—is fully aware that all is not well in the world: “Racism is often on my mind,” he writes by way of example. But then, he adds, so are pop music, books, gardening, and simple acts of kindness, all of which simple pleasures he chronicles in the “essayettes” that make up this engaging book. There is much to take delight in, beginning with the miraculous accident of birth, his parents, he writes, a “black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination.” As that brief passage makes clear, this is not a saccharine kind of delight-making but instead an exercise in extracting the good from the difficult and ugly. Sometimes this is a touch obvious: There’s delight of a kind to be found in the odd beauty of a praying mantis, but perhaps not when the mantis “is holding in its spiky mitts a large dragonfly, which buzzed and sputtered, its big translucent wings gleaming as the mantis ate its head.” Ah, well, the big ones sometimes eat the little ones, and sometimes we’re left with holes in our heads, an idiom that Gay finds interesting if also sad: “that usage of the simile implies that a hole in the head, administered by oneself, might be a reasonable response.” No, the reasonable response is, as Gay variously enumerates, to resist, enjoy such miracles as we can, revel in oddities such as the “onomatopoeicness of jenky,” eat a pawpaw whenever the chance to do so arises, water our gardens, and even throw up an enthusiastic clawed-finger air quote from time to time, just because we can.
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-792-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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