An honest, intense look at a family’s experience with severe disability.
A matter-of-fact, revealing debut memoir by the sister of a severely disabled woman.
Sullivan’s older sister, Mikey, was born prematurely and lost her vision early in life. Initially, her blindness seemed to be her main challenge. At age 2, however, Mikey began to scream, and she seemed to stop feeling pain. Her ability to communicate or understand others became severely limited. She withdrew into her own world and never returned to any sort of normalcy. The term applied by physicians was “brain damaged,” although the author alludes to more modern and precise diagnoses of “intellectual disability” and “autism.” By the time Mikey was 12, her behavior—which included sporadic episodes of violence toward herself and others—necessitated her institutionalization, a decision that both agonized and relieved the family. Her experience at institutions, however, was often substandard and even abusive, and Sullivan pulls no punches in depicting a flawed system and flawed family members who were at the same time caring, doing what they could to help. While Mikey remained the center of the family’s life in many ways, Sullivan presents a robust, multidimensional story that reflects on her own journey beyond her relationship with her sister. Being an adolescent during the height of the 1960s “free love” and drug culture—combined with the emotional issues that emerged from her family life—set the stage for what the author calls a “perfect storm” that would translate into years marked by chaos and addiction. The memoir is often heartbreaking, but Sullivan’s depictions of a complicated and loving family and the unique issues faced by siblings of the severely disabled provide a sense of hope and closure.
An honest, intense look at a family’s experience with severe disability.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-270-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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