An exceptionally well-written memoir offering insights about the darker side of the human psyche.
In his deeply personal memoir, debut author McKinley draws lessons from his brother David’s late-life suicide.
After his older brother’s suicide in 2009, McKinley wondered why his brother did it and why he didn’t succumb to suicide himself. He shares his answers in an illuminating autobiography, delving into his feeling of depression, shame and inadequacy. In Chapter 1, McKinley describes his brother’s disappearance and the family’s realization that it was suicide. He introduces the idea of “the buried man”—as if he and his brother buried the pain of self-loathing. From there, McKinley tells his life story, using Julia Cameron’s technique for healing the inner child from The Vein of Gold (1996). He writes about growing up during the turbulent ’70s in a moderately wealthy family, which slowly dissolved under the pressure of keeping up appearances. Readers learn that McKinley felt unwanted as a child; he believed bad things would happen and withdrew into childhood fantasies. Describing an evening with his parents, he says: “There were times it felt so cold in that living room I half-expected to see my own breath. The scarab scratch of pencil on paper was the only sound. We’d go on this way in silence until the fire died.” He goes on to recount his early adult life, bouncing from job to job, working in LA as a stand-up comedian, and finally settling into marriage, family and a steady career as an English teacher. Yet even into midlife, he admits being buried under suppressed rage and low self-esteem, which he medicated while refurbishing an old home—until something happened: He found a statue of a boy buried in ivy, which becomes the symbol of his life’s new direction. Rather than remaining buried in pain, he discovers the life-saving lessons his brother never learned: We should talk about our problems and ask for help, since we’re all worthy of love. McKinley’s knack for conversational, engaging writing transforms what could have been an ordinary, if tragic, tale of modern life into an intriguing read filled with exceptional insights conveyed without being preachy. Mercifully free of psychobabble, McKinley’s memoir resonates with genuine emotion.
An exceptionally well-written memoir offering insights about the darker side of the human psyche.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482761290
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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