A uniquely poetic memoir with dark humor and profound insights.
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A North Carolina woman reexamines her life after being diagnosed with a terminal illness in this memoir.
“Everything was fine. And then everything went to shit within twenty minutes,” Samples (English/Appalachian State Univ.; A Mad Girl’s Love Song, 2016, etc.) writes of a fateful leg seizure at the age of 36 that ended with her in the hospital, diagnosed with brain cancer. Before that, she was enjoying her life teaching and writing and being part of a roller derby team. Her medical dramas revolved around Type 1 diabetes and her love-hate relationship with her endocrinologist. But now everything changed; as she puts it, “Diabetes is a slow, drawn-out death; cancer is a quick blow.” She writes in percussive sentences that jump from her diagnosis and treatment to moments further in the past and other stray thoughts. She muses on the secret sex lives of her nurses and reevaluates relationships as a parade of friends, family, and exes come to visit her. She dwells most notably on Chole (pronounced “Cole”) the “narcissistic sociopath” with whom she had a tumultuous relationship. She tells of Uber drivers who offered to pray for her, her partying sister who sent her drunken texts about conspiracy theories, and how she spoke directly to her own brain tumor, asking for its opinion on the life that it might be cutting short. “This is not a Tuesday with Morrie,” she writes, speaking to the existential weight and poetic form of her writing. At times, Samples repeats simple sentence structures over and over, like a record that has broken, but she marries this with short, smoothly written vignettes that manage to be frightening, sad, and humorous all at once. At one point, for example, a nurse confuses her asymmetrical haircut for brain-surgery prep gone wrong. Samples also bravely commits to paper her darkest thoughts about dying and the most humiliating physical moments of her illness. Overall, her memoir perfectly reflects the chaos of her experience, but she guides readers through it by staying true to her belief that “honest writing is good writing.”
A uniquely poetic memoir with dark humor and profound insights.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947041-24-0
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Running Wild Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Possibly inspired by the letters Cleary has received as a children's author, this begins with second-grader Leigh Botts' misspelled fan letter to Mr. Henshaw, whose fictitious book itself derives from the old take-off title Forty Ways W. Amuse a Dog. Soon Leigh is in sixth grade and bombarding his still-favorite author with a list of questions to be answered and returned by "next Friday," the day his author report is due. Leigh is disgruntled when Mr. Henshaw's answer comes late, and accompanied by a set of questions for Leigh to answer. He threatens not to, but as "Mom keeps nagging me about your dumb old questions" he finally gets the job done—and through his answers Mr. Henshaw and readers learn that Leigh considers himself "the mediumest boy in school," that his parents have split up, and that he dreams of his truck-driver dad driving him to school "hauling a forty-foot reefer, which would make his outfit add up to eighteen wheels altogether. . . . I guess I wouldn't seem so medium then." Soon Mr. Henshaw recommends keeping a diary (at least partly to get Leigh off his own back) and so the real letters to Mr. Henshaw taper off, with "pretend," unmailed letters (the diary) taking over. . . until Leigh can write "I don't have to pretend to write to Mr. Henshaw anymore. I have learned to say what I think on a piece of paper." Meanwhile Mr. Henshaw offers writing tips, and Leigh, struggling with a story for a school contest, concludes "I think you're right. Maybe I am not ready to write a story." Instead he writes a "true story" about a truck haul with his father in Leigh's real past, and this wins praise from "a real live author" Leigh meets through the school program. Mr. Henshaw has also advised that "a character in a story should solve a problem or change in some way," a standard juvenile-fiction dictum which Cleary herself applies modestly by having Leigh solve his disappearing lunch problem with a burglar-alarmed lunch box—and, more seriously, come to recognize and accept that his father can't be counted on. All of this, in Leigh's simple words, is capably and unobtrusively structured as well as valid and realistic. From the writing tips to the divorced-kid blues, however, it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that made the Ramona books so rewarding.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1983
ISBN: 143511096X
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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