Despite inevitable repetition, this is a sensitive, poignant collection.
An immigrant memoir in essays "about growing up Indian outside of India, in non-Indian places."
In a series of previously published personal essays, creative writing professor Shah recounts 20 years of moving around, forming her ethnic identity in America’s cities and towns. The daughter of “Gujarati parents born in India and East Africa,” the author ponders how one moves in a “body often viewed as other.” How, she asks, “do you claim the I, the person dancing, the person leading the dance?” In “Skin,” she introduces us to “a brown girl here [in the U.S.], never just a girl.” She portrays a life rich with places visited and lived in as well as family, friends, writing, and exuberant Indian weddings—including, finally, her own, with its vibrant clothing, jewelry, and especially dancing, an “important part of how I understood myself to be Indian.” As an adolescent, Shah read serial novels, like those of Nancy Drew, but “there was no one like [me] in any of them.” She chronicles how, forever in search of a permanent teaching position, she moved through a series of writer-in-residence jobs, supplemented by fellowships, workshops, and retreats. She recalls watching Mira Nair’s film Monsoon Wedding, listening to its “effervescent” music: “I remember it still as a bodily sensation, the visceral pull toward the screen.” Luscious Indian food abounds, but the author shuns cooking: “I didn’t want to be anyone’s passage to India.” Shah also describes her experience at Burning Man, where she drank scotch and dropped acid: “I wanted to burn. I wanted to be free.” Despite her significant time in the U.S., the author remains an Indian American (no dash) writer who has lived a bifurcated life, both sides of which she revels in: “Words are surfacing; this is one way to dance. Words are rising: this is how to dance.”
Despite inevitable repetition, this is a sensitive, poignant collection.Pub Date: June 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8203-5723-2
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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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