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
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
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