A how-to-talk-to-the-bereaved compendium that delivers some familiar advice.
Two debut editors collect thoughts on processing grief in this anthology.
It’s hard to know what to say when offering consolation. When someone you know has lost a spouse or close family member, the same pat responses always seem to come out of your mouth. “Twice before, I’d stood beside parents on the day of a child’s death, a witness to the awkward ballet of distraught looks, too-tight hugs, and tear-choked words that attend shattering loss,” writes Fisher in her introduction. “I’d heard fumbling attempts to comfort that surely only deepened the pain of the bereaved.” This book’s stated purpose is to help readers be better friends to the grievers in their lives. Fisher and Jones solicited short pieces—both poems and prose—from writers who had lost someone close to them. Some deal with the nature of sorrow itself while others focus more directly on the ways that other people treated the contributors during their mourning periods. In the poem “10 Things I Would Tell You if You Were Still Here,” Jami Kahn writes that “people keep asking me how i’m doing, like you were a sprained ankle or a broken nail. i tell them i have phantom limb syndrome, and they just frown, like i’m hopeless. (maybe they’re right.)” In the short essay “In Search of Peace,” Setareh Makinejad tells how she rebuked relatives who attempted to get her to stop wearing black after the death of her daughter. In addition to the pieces, these contributors answered questions about the best and worst things people said during their moments of anguish. As in all anthologies, the individual items are hit-or-miss. The tragic topic may forgive the frequent incidents of sappy and otherwise poor writing, but the reader wonders why the editors included so many works that don’t really have anything to do with the interactions between the still living. The survey questions are more useful, given the book’s worthy objective. While they present a few helpful tips, the participants are so similar in their advice (listen, bring food, hang out, don’t make it about yourself) that the text quickly becomes repetitive, providing few surprises.
A how-to-talk-to-the-bereaved compendium that delivers some familiar advice.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-242-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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