A probing, surprising mental health memoir.
In Kolton’s debut memoir, the doctor details her struggles with dissociative identity disorder.
Dissociative identity disorder—or DID—is better known to many by its former name: multiple personality disorder. In cases of extreme childhood trauma, the mind can create alternate identities in order to cope. Outwardly, Shelley Kolton was the picture of stability. She had three children, a loving partner, and a successful OB-GYN practice in New York. Inwardly, she was suffering panic attacks, blackouts, and horrifying flashbacks to events in her childhood that she wasn’t sure ever took place. After years in various forms of therapy, she finally began working with social worker Yael Sank, who specialized in caring for trauma patients. With Yael’s help, Kolton discovered she contained within her mind 31 distinct personalities, which Kolton calls her “alters.” They had names like Little Girl, Denier, Hate/Raven, and Joey. Through them, Kolton was able to unearth the truth of her childhood: serial abuse at the hands of the cult members who lived next door to her when she was a child. The memoir is an account of Kolton’s treatment, during which, over the course of many years, she was able to peel back the veils of her many alters and get to the real story behind the girl who created them. Kolton’s prose is taut and tension filled, as here where she returns to her childhood home to investigate her former neighbors’ house: “I climbed down a ladder and into a small basement room with a boiler and a dangling light bulb. The dirt floor crunched under my feet, and when I lit a match, the ladder came into focus. It had eight rungs. The scene was exactly as I had drawn it.” The book makes for a difficult read at times; both the abuse Kolton suffered and her accounts of her dissociations are quite disturbing. Nevertheless, the memoir offers a remarkable window into DID and its treatment. (Kolton now considers herself “largely recovered.”) Tying in threads of feminism, lesbianism, and motherhood, the book is an intriguing meditation on the labyrinthine workings of the human mind as well as the dedication required to overcome the traumas of childhood.
A probing, surprising mental health memoir.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 320
Publisher: FLR Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2021
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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