A readable mix of romantic anxiety and mystic self-development.
A woman’s complicated personal life prompts a spiritual journey in this memoir.
At the beginning of her nonfiction debut, Diamond describes the separate vacations that she and her spouse took in 1995. Her husband, Joe, decided to go to Las Vegas, and she opted to go to Chicago to visit her family, and it’s there that she met up with somebody she hadn’t seen in 13 years: Ray, who was once the love of her life and the man whom a psychic once predicted she would marry and live with happily ever after. The meeting between the author and her old flame turned passionate, and she was forced to confront the awkward truth that she was now in love with two different men—and how her feelings for Ray could destroy her relationship with her family. She decided to consult Angel, another psychic who brought up the concept of past lives as a possible explanation for Diamond’s uncontrollable attraction to a man who wasn’t her husband. The book goes on to relate Diamond’s odyssey into the world of spiritualism, during which she encountered many like-minded searchers and mentors, and it becomes increasingly more elaborate as it goes on. The author’s accounts of dabbling in reincarnation theory, tarot, and other mystical areas sit awkwardly alongside her regular references to her Catholic upbringing. However, her choice to consistently return to her memories of the ongoing drama between herself, Joe, and Ray is a wise one, as it grounds what might otherwise have been a formless spiritual quest with a classic love triangle. The resolution of the latter story will strike many readers as decidedly anticlimactic, but the humanity at the book’s heart remains compelling throughout.
A readable mix of romantic anxiety and mystic self-development.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982235-07-9
Page Count: 140
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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