While some readers may view this account as too raw and self-obsessive, it stands as a vivid depiction of mental illness.
A wrenching account of a difficult upbringing and a chaotic brain that will leave readers marveling at the author’s endurance.
Prairie Schooner assistant editor Montgomery (English/Bridgewater State Univ.; Leaving Tracks: A Prairie Guide, 2017, etc.) has tackled the subject of madness in poetry (Regenerate: Poems of Mad Women, 2017) and in her award-winning doctoral dissertation, which grew into this book. Portions of the book first appeared in the literary journals the Rumpus and the Normal School. The author offers a gripping picture of the real pain and suffering of someone diagnosed with chronic mental illness. Diagnosed with severe anxiety at an early age, Montgomery was serially medicated, or overmedicated, with Celexa, Xanax, Zoloft, and Buspirone; add to that some four years of talk therapy. Later, other diagnoses included PTSD and OCD. “The waiting game will continue for many years,” she writes, “as I bounce from medication to medication, searching for something that won’t injure my body so much, something that will let me off my knees.” The author’s memoir is rich with details about her troubled family, led by problematic parents who were quick to detect sprouting anxiety symptoms in their offspring and who, over the years, adopted multiple dysfunctional children. Whether by nature or nurture, Montgomery seems almost to have been doomed to an existence marked by mental illness. Her revelations about her own experiences lead to discussions of how thinking about mental illness has evolved. She offers a brief look at the expansion of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, some history of the treatment of females, once labeled with hysteria and thought to be suffering from wandering wombs, and a discussion of once-used asylums. The author is clearly concerned with how anxiety disorders, depression, and other mental disorders have been—and are currently—regarded in our culture.
While some readers may view this account as too raw and self-obsessive, it stands as a vivid depiction of mental illness.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5486-8
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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