A powerful, painful, but ultimately empowering record of how one woman mended “her fractured soul.”
In this memoir, a woman collaborates with her therapist to share her tragic experience of processing the murder of her two young sons at the hands of her ex-husband.
“What do you do when your primary purpose, your most important and most sacred role in life, is snuffed out by the horrific actions of the biological father of your children?” So begins Stark’s wrenching account. On Dec. 19, 2016, Stark and her spouse went to pick up her sons, Ryder, 13, and Radek, 11, at her ex-husband’s house only to find they had been murdered by their biological father, Corry MacDougall, who then took his own life. Though Stark had primary custody, she had agreed to let her sons live with MacDougall so they could play at a more competitive level of hockey. Therapist Young Kolbuc is the primary narrator, meticulously chronicling the process by which she helped Stark process her trauma and “turn this pain resonating in her body into power.” An unsparing and maddening portrait of the justice system that did not protect Stark or her boys emerges. Young Kolbuc recounts how MacDougall ridiculed then-8-year-old Radek for wanting to take a year off from hockey to try dance classes and told him he “would only be picking up his ‘son’ Ryder” from then on. If the boys told him they loved their mother, “he told them to f*#k off and go to their rooms.” To readers who may question this one-sided account, Stark asserts: “The ‘other side’ blew off his own head after taking a loaded shotgun to my sleeping children. That is the other side of the story.” Stark’s love, rage, and grief are palpable, and Young Kolbuc’s empathetic voice and insights offer a path forward that could be invaluable for others forced to cope with the loss of a child or the bitterest of divorces. Young Kolbuc also expresses the hope that Stark’s story will spark a discussion about reviewing “laws regarding custody and access to men who continue to display abusive and disrespectful actions to their ex-wives.” Ultimately, the book serves as a loving tribute to Ryder and Radek and a strong stand for safety and justice for all children.
A powerful, painful, but ultimately empowering record of how one woman mended “her fractured soul.”Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-910403-7
Page Count: 390
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Of great interest to Didion completists, though a minor entry in the body of her work.
The late novelist and journalist records her innermost, deeply personal struggles.
Didion died in 2021. Afterward, a file of private notes was discovered among her things, including notes addressed to her late husband, John Gregory Dunne, recounting sessions with the noted Freudian psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon, “a staunch defender of talk therapy.” Talk they do, with Didion serving up a battery of problems and MacKinnon offering wise if perhaps non-actionable responses to them, for instance, “Nothing about families turns out to be easy, does it.” It’s not easy, for sure, and Didion’s chief concern throughout is her daughter, Quintana Roo, who died after a long illness, the subject of Didion’s 2011 memoir Blue Nights. Indeed, so many of the conversations concern Quintana that Didion—by design, one supposes—skirts her own issues, although MacKinnon identifies some: “I did think you might have developed more self-awareness,” he says, referring to Didion’s habit of squirreling herself away whenever difficult subjects arose. Didion counters that she cherishes privacy, adding that she sometimes left her own parties to shelter in her office and admitting that her long habit of overwork was a means of emotional distancing. It’s not wholly that Didion lacks that self-awareness, but that the keenest insights about her come from others, as when she records, “I said a friend had once remarked that while most people she knew had very strong competent exteriors and were bowls of jelly inside, I was just the opposite.” That Didion was constantly anxious, sometimes to the point of needing medication, will come as no surprise to close readers of her work, but the depth of her anguish and guilt over her inability to save her daughter—she threw plenty of money at her, but little in the way of love—is both affecting and saddening.
Of great interest to Didion completists, though a minor entry in the body of her work.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780593803677
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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