A bitingly candid memoir with a happy ending.
A stand-up comedian with a successful career grapples with the problem of finding balance in her private life.
At 35, Colonna was in the driver’s seat, at least professionally. But in her personal life, a long-term, live-in relationship had just ended, and she was alone. Uninterested in meeting new men at bars and with little free time to spare, Colonna “recycled” an ex-lover who she soon realized was as unsatisfyingly immature as ever. Loneliness was not the problem; Colonna “really enjoy[ed] living on [her] own.” Part of the difficulty of being a 30-something single had to do with the fact that anytime she wanted to do anything socially, most of her potential female companions were occupied with husbands and children. Worse still, whenever she did go out or travel with a woman, she often found others quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, speculating that she was gay. So Colonna made the most of being single and tried new things, like meeting up with men she flirted with on Twitter, getting set up on blind dates by well-meaning friends and accepting the advances of obsessed male fans after her shows. Eventually, and with her ambivalent blessing, a married friend assumed the comedian’s identity and went online to look for the dates her friend had no time to arrange. But love would come to her on its own terms and in its own way when a football player temperamentally so like Colonna that he seemed “created in a lab for [her]” found the comedian through a mutual friend. That the author can look at herself and her dating mishaps with honesty and self-deprecating humor is perhaps the greatest strength of this occasionally frivolous but mostly enjoyable book. That she was also able to find, and genuinely appreciate, the love for which she had been searching is an added bonus.
A bitingly candid memoir with a happy ending.Pub Date: March 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7192-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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
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