Star-studded, gossipy, and engaging.
The daughter of celebrities reflects on fame, parenthood, and style.
Costume designer Tynan makes her literary debut in a candid and entertaining memoir featuring her alcoholic, combative parents, theater critic Kenneth Tynan and novelist Elaine Dundy, and their assorted glamorous friends. Growing up in England and New York in the 1950s and ’60s, the author observed her parents engaged in constant “frenzied feverish activity” of parties, openings, and dinners. “I now realize,” she writes, “that my parents were the original celebrity hounds. They relentlessly and unabashedly pursued famous people.” They had little time for their only child, leaving her in the care of a changing cast of nannies. Besides their flaming fights, which resulted in broken pottery and drunken rages, the two openly had affairs. “When I was ten years old,” Tynan recalls laconically, “they decided theirs would be an open marriage. They deemed this the solution to their compulsive infidelity.” Her parents eventually divorced, and her mother spiraled into depression; her father, remarried, still pursued other women. Tynan looked at their behavior, including her father’s predilection for sadomasochism, “with a kind of voyeuristic fascination.” But her upbringing shaped her own relationship to alcohol, drugs, and men. For a while, she suffered from vaginismus, caused, she believes, by “a fear of sex” incited by her parents’ fights. Besides chronicling her erratic family, Tynan reveals her development as a fashionista and costume designer. At the age of 14, with her own clothing allowance, she followed her taste and instincts to hone a distinctive style. Each chapter focuses on some article of clothing (her first bra, sumptuous apple-green shoes) that evokes an episode of her life. “What was I going to wear?” becomes a familiar refrain as Tynan recounts social events and job interviews where she wanted to make a notable impression. Her vivid descriptions reflect her love of clothes, designers, fabrics, and, not least, shopping.
Star-studded, gossipy, and engaging.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2368-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
