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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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