A brutally honest yet passionately convincing family account.
A mother recounts the challenges of raising an adoptive son with a severe mental illness in this debut memoir.
Giese, a Pennsylvania-based teacher, had wanted to adopt a kid ever since reading A Child Called It (1995)by Dave Pelzer during her freshman year in college. In 2008, she and her husband, Eddie, were offered the opportunity to privately adopt a 13-month-old boy named Nicholas. Growing older, Nicholas began to display worrying signs of aggression. When the author gave birth to the first of two daughters, 2-year-old Nicholas would hit and bite the baby. By 3, he was laying blame on the imaginary “other Nicholas” for his behavior. Giese recalls the difficulties of seeking the right help following a range of uncertain diagnoses, from ADHD to sensory processing disorder. At 7, Nicholas was described as having a “psychotic break.” He would later find a knife and relate his plans to kill the entire family and sexually assault his mother. The memoir tells of both Nicholas’ progress as he bounced in and out of pediatric psychiatric institutions as well as the author’s struggles as a loving mother and aspiring writer. Giese’s prose is searingly frank, although some readers may find her more graphic recollections unsettling: “He holds his filthy hand to my face while his naked body pins me to my own wall. It smells putrid.” Such passages may be difficult to read but bravely confront the severity of Nicholas’ mental illness. The author writes with a powerful and unfaltering compassion throughout, challenging readers’ perceptions of mental health: “If a child gets cancer, we don’t say Johnny is cancerous….Yet, if someone develops a mental illness, it suddenly becomes the defining characteristic of what they are.” The epilogue contains a series of stirring wishes that call out shortcomings in the health care system and elsewhere: “I wish mental health services were more accessible, affordable, and easier to obtain.” The compelling, if harrowing, book also details useful coping strategies and lists mental health resources. Giese was asked by Nicholas to write this memoir to encourage others to talk about “how brains can get sick.” The result is an important document that captures the everyday efforts of a family battling mental illness and inspires debate about a system that fails to offer adequate support.
A brutally honest yet passionately convincing family account.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73720-681-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Binkies and Briefcases
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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