An honest depiction of one woman’s midlife trials.
Arnell, an assistant professor at the Parsons School of Design, recounts a midlife crisis and her journey toward healing in her debut memoir.
The author opens her memoir in New York City in 2015 with an account of waking up horribly hungover and miserable the day after a New Year’s Eve party, with a black eye and blistered skin.She then details what drove her to that state and how she began to doubt her own value as her ad agency business eroded and she dealt with her children leaving home: “I was jobless, directionless, divorced, single, middle-aged, and the last of my three children had recently moved out for college.” Readers see her interactions with others who witnessed her downfall; one acquaintance commented, “My, how the mighty have fallen,” and she recounts how that phrase began to weigh heavily on her. However, she also points out the positive impact of having a support system when one is at their lowest point. In her case, that system consisted of her children, and she reveals how, even as they helped her, she felt guilt about depending on them. The author’s story of her downward spiral and her unwillingness to sugarcoat her feelings for readers make for a difficult read. However, many readers, and especially those who’ve experienced depression, will find that it hits home. Spirituality plays a big role in Arnell’s approach to healing; at a key point in her life, she met two sister missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and she notes her ensuing feeling that she should go to church: “Maybe Jesus will save me. Someone has to, for fuck’s sake.” Many other crisis memoirs focus on how their subjects took control and reshaped their lives, but Arnell’s unusually concentrates on the concept of being saved by others. Although her approach to healing isn’t straightforward, readers are able to see Arnell’s habit-building process, which leaves one with a sense of hope for her eventual healing. Over the course of this memoir, her honesty allows readers to acknowledge that growth is not linear—and that’s OK.
An honest depiction of one woman’s midlife trials.Pub Date: July 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-293926-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Savio Republic
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2021
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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