A dramatic and involving story of tough people undergoing difficult self-assessments.
Botts offers a self-help program in the form of kitchen-table dialogues.
“Growing up, the kitchen table wasn’t just a piece of furniture,” writes the author in his nonfiction debut. “It’s where hard conversations happened.” Just such an old-fashioned kitchen table is at the center of this book’s action—it belongs to a woman dubbed “Auntie” Kenyah, who earned her nickname during 30 years of counseling military personnel and their families. She invites three people to her table: two Marines named Rob and Stacy, who’ve deployed together twice and been friends for decades, and a civilian named Nia, a no-nonsense VA nurse manager. All three have long-buried personal issues, and they all hope that resolutions might be found at Auntie Kenyah’s table. (“When people were about to tell the truth and wanted to survive it,” Botts writes, “they went to her kitchen.”) Rob’s problem is that he overcommits to relationships before they’ve developed; Nia has the opposite problem, since she builds emotional walls and avoids commitment. Stacy talks too much and laughs too loud to mask relationship problems. Over the course of 20 weeks, the three meet at Auntie Kenyah’s kitchen table to courageously dig into their problems and construct new solutions. Botts’ narrative is full of spoken dialogue in addition to the inner monologues of the characters (who are based on real people). The author’s decision to cast a self-help and motivational primer in the trappings of fiction (bringing in a number of secondary figures to flesh out the personal dramas) plays to his talent for penning tense dialogue; despite consisting almost entirely of therapeutic discussions, this is a very gripping read, with strongly drawn characters and genuine emotional stakes. The characters gain new understandings of themselves (Nia realizes, “Somewhere along the way, I started measuring my value by who chose me instead of who I chose”), and Auntie Kenyah’s insights are always pithy and knowing. Readers in all kinds of emotional straits will find plenty of real wisdom here.
A dramatic and involving story of tough people undergoing difficult self-assessments.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2026
ISBN: 9798243983877
Page Count: 539
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: today
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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