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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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