An engaging and edifying look at one woman’s Jungian journey.
This novelistic memoir explores a woman’s lifelong spiritual quest.
The story of the main character, Susan, begins before she is born. Susan, as a soul (with the name of Soonam), makes the decision to incarnate on Earth. Her arrival occurs in 1947. Even though this is a choice on her part, she often wonders as a child what exactly she’s doing on the planet. By 1969, she’s married and living in Japan. A few years later, she’s divorced and residing in New York City, where she digs into topics such as the unconscious and God energy. These subjects lead her to the eminent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Jung’s work will play a major role in her life. The narrative follows Susan over the decades as she spends time in different relationships, earns a Ph.D. in psychology, and adopts a daughter named Charlotte. Throughout it all, the author examines concepts such as intuition and astral projection, which she further develops for readers with suggested exercises. For instance, if they want to enlist the help of their unconscious, they can focus on a “spontaneous fantasy” and observe it closely. As Susan navigates both the changing times and “the ego’s willfulness,” she has much to uncover. The excavating isn’t always easy; at one point, she reflects how, at the end of a relationship, she wishes she could receive a refund for the last 10 years. Plunket’s story skillfully illustrates how humans are “complicated beings with a lot going on.” Much of the tale’s appeal comes from seeing how Susan deals with this complexity during her wide-ranging spiritual odyssey. But the ambitious memoir can be dry at times. Assertions such as “Joy is the state of mind which creates the frequency to allow your desires to manifest” tend to be clunky rather than revelatory. Still, Plunket does a fine job of balancing Susan’s practical world and the dreamier aspects of her existence.
An engaging and edifying look at one woman’s Jungian journey.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781803415239
Page Count: 184
Publisher: 6Th Books
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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