A brave, if harrowing, work that addresses the issues surrounding mental health, treatment, and rehabilitation head-on.
A despairing mother and a defiant teenage daughter confront drug addiction in Burrowes’ debut memoir.
In the years leading up to tenth grade, Hannah Burrowes lived a happy, healthy life with her family. By the time she was 15, though, she’d progressed from “moody to malicious,” according to her mother, the author of this memoir. A self-proclaimed outsider, unimpressed by her “Mean Barbie” classmates, she gravitated toward the art-fueled scene of downtown Santa Cruz, California, where she was enthralled by what she calls its “wave of weirdness.” The memoir goes on to relate how the teen’s recreational drug use spiraled into a full-blown, life-threatening addiction, involving regular use of Ecstasy, OxyContin, and psychedelics. The deterioration of her relationship with her family became such that her mother lived in fear of her, and in time, she was sent off to a tough residential rehabilitation program in Utah, where she would face a brutally cold winter. It’s a desperate story of teen addiction, punctuated by misdiagnosis, overdose, and rehabilitation. In the memoir’s foreword, Burrowes writes: “During our two years of treatment, I learned that there can be more than one truth, more than one way of thinking.” This revelation shapes the structure of the narrative, as each event is examined from both the mother’s and daughter’s perspectives. It effectively reveals the voice of a scared mom questioning her approach to parenting (“all I find are the taunts of an oppositional teenager and my angry words. Did I miss something? What have I done?”) and that of an equally frightened, confused young girl who lost control: “I really don’t know how many pills I took, I don’t fucking know how drinking or taking E makes lithium stronger, but they keep telling me it does and that I’m screwed.” As a result, the ugly anatomy of addiction is laid bare, using plain, unadulterated language drawn from the rawness of personal experience. Those facing similar challenges will find courage and hope in this informative memoir’s outcome.
A brave, if harrowing, work that addresses the issues surrounding mental health, treatment, and rehabilitation head-on.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-467-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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