A terrifying and telling memoir, but one that leave unanswered questions.
A harrowing memoir of domestic violence and mental illness in 1960s and ’70s Australia.
O’Leary writes that, beginning when she was a toddler, she suffered abuse at the hands of her late father. She recalls him tossing her into the air, playful and fatherly, and then suddenly dropping his arms to his sides and letting her hit the ground. When she was 4, she writes, she first glimpsed one of her father’s multiple personalities: while playing at her paternal grandmother’s house, she saw a “grotesque figure” in black boots, a grey wig, and pink lipstick. The person, who turned out to be her father in disguise, looked like her grandmother, she says, but threatened to cut her with a razor. The following year, O’Leary writes, she watched her father brutally and inexplicably murder three people. The domestic violence then escalated, according to O’Leary, who says that her father chloroformed her, buried her, tied her up, and sexually abused her; her favorite pets died horrible deaths, and her toys were lost or destroyed. Her father, she says, killed again, several times, with her as a witness; she endured this in order to protect her mother and three brothers, she says, whom her father regularly threatened to kill. The family lived in the Australian bush with no phone and little recourse, as the police refused to get involved in domestic cases. The sections of the book portraying the abuse are powerful. In them, O’Leary shows a child who couldn’t make sense of the strange figures she saw, the handkerchief that made her black out, or a trench where she was imprisoned. The confusion, uncertainty, and sickening foreboding ring true and offer vital insights into the experience of abuse, including the fact that victims had few options, especially in the 1960s. Other sections, however, including descriptions of events well before the author’s birth, are written like a novel, providing precise details and dialogue as well as the thoughts in the characters’ heads. Although the book is billed as an autobiography, O’Leary reveals little about her adult life, such as how her childhood experience affected her relationships with her own five children or how it feels to finally disclose the perpetrator of so many unresolved murders.
A terrifying and telling memoir, but one that leave unanswered questions.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5196-9587-1
Page Count: 258
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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