A candid, instructive memoir of self-growth.
Ahern, well-known for her award-winning gluten-free cookbooks (Gluten-Free Girl Every Day, 2013, etc.), compiles a series of essays that explore her childhood, young adulthood, marriage, and motherhood.
In her first collection, the author explores a question the doctor asked her after a stress-induced ministroke landed her in the intensive care unit. “Where in your life do you not feel good enough?” he asked. “It was the question that compelled me,” she writes, “over the next year, to start letting go of everything that didn’t bring me joy.” The first place she had to start was with her parents, particularly her mother, who suffered from panic attacks and kept Ahern’s life “entirely restricted.” As she writes, “I was not allowed to visit a friend’s house, by myself, until I was seventeen.” Her parents fought every day, but there was never a mention of therapy for anybody in the family. Ahern discusses her low self-esteem due to her body size, the difficulty of being a virgin into her mid-30s, and finding friends and building a community of people around her that made her feel safe and complete. She discusses how she and her husband wrote cookbooks and started a gluten-free flour company (an endeavor that caused extremely unhealthy levels of stress), her daughter’s difficult infancy, and her gradual easing into and acceptance of herself despite her faults. Ahern’s narrative will resonate especially with small-business owners, women who have difficult mothers, and, most of all, those who have issues with body image. “I am fifty-two years old now,” she writes. “Instead of waiting for permission to love my own body only if it is sufficiently small enough, I have surveyed what I am lucky enough to have, from my feet on the ground to the top of my head, and find joy in this body now.”
A candid, instructive memoir of self-growth.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63217-217-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Sasquatch
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.
As much about Everywoman as one particular woman, French author Ernaux's autobiographical novel laconically describes the cruel realities of old age for a woman once vibrant and independent.
The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides that the only way she can accept her mother's death is to begin "to write about my mother. She is the only woman who really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile dementia for two years...I would also like to capture the real woman, the woman who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.'' And she proceeds to tell the story of this woman—who "preferred giving to everybody rather than taking from them,'' fiercely ambitious and anxious to better herself and her daughter—for whom she worked long hours in the small café and store the family owned. There are the inevitable differences and disputes as the daughter, better educated, rebels against the mother, but the mother makes "the greatest sacrifice of all, which was to part with me.'' The two women never entirely lose contact, however, as the daughter marries, the father dies, and both women move. Proud and self-sufficient, the mother lives alone, but then she has an accident, develops Alzheimer's, and must move to a hospital. A year after her death, the daughter, still mourning, observes, "I shall never hear the sound of her voice again—the last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.'' Never sentimental and always restrained: a deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality.
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.Pub Date: May 12, 1991
ISBN: 0-941423-51-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.
A firsthand account of how the Navajo language was used to help defeat the Japanese in World War II.
At the age of 17, Nez (an English name assigned to him in kindergarten) volunteered for the Marines just months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Growing up in a traditional Navajo community, he became fluent in English, his second language, in government-run boarding schools. The author writes that he wanted to serve his country and explore “the possibilities and opportunities offered out there in the larger world.” Because he was bilingual, he was one of the original 29 “code talkers” selected to develop a secret, unbreakable code based on the Navajo language, which was to be used for battlefield military communications on the Pacific front. Because the Navajo language is tonal and unwritten, it is extremely difficult for a non-native speaker to learn. The code created an alphabet based on English words such as ant for “A,” which were then translated into its Navajo equivalent. On the battlefield, Navajo code talkers would use voice transmissions over the radio, spoken in Navajo to convey secret information. Nez writes movingly about the hard-fought battles waged by the Marines to recapture Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and others, in which he and his fellow code talkers played a crucial role. He situates his wartime experiences in the context of his life before the war, growing up on a sheep farm, and after when he worked for the VA and raised a family in New Mexico. Although he had hoped to make his family proud of his wartime role, until 1968 the code was classified and he was sworn to silence. He sums up his life “as better than he could ever have expected,” and looks back with pride on the part he played in “a new, triumphant oral and written [Navajo] tradition,” his culture's contribution to victory.
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-425-24423-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
