An uncensored and eccentric delight.
A British-born entertainment journalist’s account of how an unplanned pregnancy and single motherhood became the starting points for an unexpected adventure in self-acceptance.
Heawood always imagined that her future would involve “a lovely farmhouse…a dog and storybooks and trees and long invigorating walks” as well as children and a “yet-to-materialize” husband/father. Her present, however, involved singlehood, parties, quirky friends, and lively but unsteady freelance work as a Hollywood celebrity journalist, and the doctors told her that her polycystic ovary syndrome would make natural conception impossible. The next time she visited her long-term on-again, off-again long-distance musician lover, she became pregnant. Despite the lover’s misgivings about their fitness to be parents (“he said a child deserved better than us”), Heawood set a determined course for motherhood. But rather than give up her lifestyle, the author carried on along her free-spirited way. She fought through morning sickness at an interview with Jodie Foster while indiscreetly questioning the then-closeted actress about her lesbianism. Later, her “swollen breasts…and…bump” in full view, she attended the Coachella Music Festival with two young men, “one of whom she had only just met.” She gave birth in London and then settled down in a rented house in a district she loved for its “psychodrama and paranoia and spilt beer.” Floundering in the world of postpartum dating, the author desperately tried to navigate sexuality and motherhood, often with hilarious results. Still single in the end, Heawood realized that her truest love was her small daughter, with whom she formed a small but happy “republic of two.” “A single parent is both structure and playground,” she writes, “walls and soft landings, mother tropes and father tropes….I have degendered the situation and don’t see myself as a mother, but as a parent, as the adult, as the introduction to what the world can be like. As neutral as passion, as pretty as heat.” Raw and funny, Heawood’s memoir celebrates the messiness of life and motherhood with boldness, panache, and unexpected moments of real poignancy.
An uncensored and eccentric delight.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-49906-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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
PERSPECTIVES
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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