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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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