A stirring memoir that beautifully and humorously captures the pain of unresolved loss.
A writer recounts her playful search for buried treasure and a more serious hunt for some emotional meaning that she struggles to define.
At the age of 46, debut author Miller had what most would consider an enviable life: a vibrant career as a writer and “part-time college English teacher,” a loving husband, and “two madcap kids,” not to mention no shortage of friends. But she still felt profoundly discontent, as if she was “made of longing”: “What is missing that will make me feel whole, and why, when I’m teetering on the brink of fifty, can I still not find it?” She channeled her questing energy into a gamesome “armchair treasure hunt,” an organized competition in which the contestants interpreted clues in order to track down $10,000 in coins buried somewhere in New York City. She became increasingly obsessed with the search and developed an unhealthy crush on her treasure hunt partner, David, who stimulated “unbidden longing” in her. She spent so much time driving back and forth between her home in Boston and New York, her marriage to her husband, Mark, began to suffer. When pressed why precisely she felt such an urgent compulsion to find the treasure, she was exasperatingly incapable of articulating an answer. The author poignantly documents, in sometimes-painful vignettes of retrospection, the dysfunctional childhood that surely was the principal source of her midlife crisis. Miller recounts that she grew up in an emotionally arid home: Her mother was coldly angry and her father, distant and uncommunicative at best and mercurially violent on his worst days. Her prose is both playfully anecdotal and openhandedly confessional—the author achieves an impressive balance between lighthearted banter and heartache. The chief preoccupation of the remembrance—the author’s amorphous but devastating dissatisfaction at approaching 50—is not exactly new literary ground, and the symbolism of the treasure hunt, if that search weren’t real, would read as a clumsily obvious metaphor. But her writing style is so unpretentiously candid and her childhood so grimly remarkable that readers are unlikely to mind. This is a moving recollection brimming with emotional insights.
A stirring memoir that beautifully and humorously captures the pain of unresolved loss.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-941932-12-4
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Brown Paper Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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