Revealing, irreverent and strangely tender.
San Diego print and radio journalist Johnson details the painful metamorphosis he underwent from homophobic child to a mature adult who could accept his mother’s sexual orientation.
At age ten, her ex-girlfriend chose to break it to him that his mom was a lesbian. This surprising revelation tested the delicate family balance established years earlier when his parents had divorced: While his sister raged and acknowledged her feelings of betrayal, Johnson drove his pain and anger deep within. The ensuing period of delinquent behavior put an agonizing strain on his relationship with the mother he had always considered his soul mate. Recalling with self-deprecating sarcasm the vandalism, drug and alcohol experimentation, rampant promiscuity, gay trashing and born-again Christian phases he underwent, the author also examines how he and his sister hurt their mother. “During therapy,” he writes, “my mom explained that we had scared her deep into the closet—past the hamper, past the shoes, into the mental crawl space behind the insulation. Because we called people we didn’t like fags and things we didn’t like gay, she really thought her kids hated homos.” It was only when he was in college that Johnson finally made the decision to accept his mother as she was. Still, he admits, such acceptance is an ongoing process: “There’s no parade where a papier-mâché replica of my old, bigoted self burns in effigy and everyone drinks champagne until we’re happy. We can only do this one uncomfortable moment at a time.” A master of the declarative, the author offers numerous thoughtful observations on the emotive force of family dynamics and how internalized shame can stunt a life.
Revealing, irreverent and strangely tender.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55970-871-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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
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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