A follow-up that tackles loneliness and isolation with remarkable candor and biting comedy.
A writer continues to explore life after a terminal diagnosis in her second memoir.
After Frontal Matter: Glue Gone Wild (2018), writer and Appalachian State University professor Samples has returned to the short, potent essays that recount her experience of terminal glioblastoma multiforme, a type of aggressive brain cancer. While her previous book examined the more immediate and physical implications of cancer, Samples now turns to the fallout in her personal life as treatments start to span years. (“You’re saying I might have to do this for 12 more years?” she hilariously asked a doctor trying to give her hopeful life span predictions.) The different anecdotes are set in Boone, North Carolina, and various locations where she traveled with her family. Samples stumbled after her hard-partying sister, Sarah, in Brooklyn and followed her mother, Jenifer, on Alaskan and Caribbean cruises (“Suzanne + Brain Cancer = Jenifer Buys Cruises”). There is a loose chronology covering her return to work, the publication of her first memoir, her move to live with her parents in West Virginia, and finally, the rise of Covid-19, which introduced the rest of the world to the isolation she had known for years. But it’s that very sense of isolation that serves as the real glue holding her narratives together. “It’s funny how everyone is your friend until you get brain cancer,” Samples posts on social media, inadvertently creating comments that end a yearslong friendship. Her attempt at a one-night stand with a younger woman created a volatile relationship that she refused to put above her art. Several friends disappeared, some following her own outbursts. It all reinforced Samples’ sense that she lived alone in a “purgatory,” somewhere between recovered and still terminally ill. (She nails this unsettling sentiment in one of the book’s standout stories featuring a dreamlike support group that takes place “nowhere.”) Samples guides us through perhaps even more troubling, existential territory, but she has yet to lose her caustic, playful wit. Her asides are sharp and laugh-out-loud funny, making her grim purgatory a fascinating, strangely entertaining place to visit.
A follow-up that tackles loneliness and isolation with remarkable candor and biting comedy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-94-704192-9
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Running Wild Press
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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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