A grueling memoir that offers a clear portrait of people and places but could benefit from more reflection and analysis.
Erickson tells of a difficult childhood and an abusive father in this debut memoir.
In the mid-1950s, just three days after she was born, the author nearly died: Her mother, a Christian Scientist, refused to get her medical help after her umbilical knot wouldn’t stop bleeding; fortunately, though, her mother relented. For the rest of the author’s childhood and adolescence, her life was defined by the very different personalities of her parents. Her mother, she says, was kind, averse to conflict, and devoutly religious, while her father often sabotaged his own ambitious plans, due in part to his alcoholism. He aspired to become a land developer and rancher, and the family spent long stretches of time on his growing ranch in the Sierra Nevada. Erickson, more than any of her four siblings, shared his love of horses and the outdoors, but their relationship, she writes, was scarred by horrific emotional and physical abuse; she says that her father shot her beloved heifer in front of her, accused her of being responsible for a horseback riding accident that crippled her mother, casually scratched her face while showing her a new bridle, and declared that he neither loved nor respected her in the middle of a family dinner. Her mother showered her with love and gifts, she says, but turned a blind eye to the abuse. Erickson reveals that she sometimes resorted to self-harm in order to feel in control. Overall, the author vividly captures her parents in this memoir, paying special attention to telling how her father’s volatility created heart-pounding anxiety, showing him to be kind one day and abusive the next. There’s particular poignancy in later chapters when Erickson portrays how her father’s alcoholism physically debilitated him and how she struggled to reconcile her own feelings of pity and guilt with memories of abuse. However, her narrative might have benefited from more observations gained from the passage of time; she adroitly captures her in-the-moment reactions as a child and a young woman but rarely looks at the long-term impact of events on her post-adolescent life.
A grueling memoir that offers a clear portrait of people and places but could benefit from more reflection and analysis.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-465-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Yet another entrant in the anecdotal, pop-psych literature on marriage and divorce, this one from the coauthors of Second Chances (1989). Psychologist/marriage counselor Wallerstein and science/medical writer Blakeslee announce sententiously that Americans ``share a profound sense of discomfort with the present state of marriage and the family, even wondering sometimes if marriage as an institution can survive.'' They go on to analyze the life habits of 50 mostly white, comfortably middle-class, well- educated couples in the San Francisco Bay Area—a group that Wallerstein admits is narrow but which she claims is socially trend-setting. The couples neatly cleave into four fuzzy categories of marriage: romantic, rescue, companionate, and traditional. When interviewed, the couples had all been married for more than nine years, had one or more children, regarded their marriage as happy, and were willing to be interviewed separately and together. Other of Wallerstein's previous studies, making use of similarly small, homogenous samples, have rightly come under attack by her peers (Newsweek, February 6, 1989) for their built-in statistical invalidity, but she has not taken their criticisms to heart. Her conclusions generally boil down to the expected: that in good marriages each partner must respect the other and let the other be his or her own person. The book is studded with such startlingly bald truisms in the place of meaningful analysis. Only occasionally do the authors hit on a useful point, as when they observe that all successful marriages, rather than being conflict-free, make allowance for ``the expression of difference, conflict, and anger'' and that an adolescent in the household is a blasting cap that can blow apart the stoutest marital fortress. One in two marriages now ends in divorce in this country, a sadly telling statistic. Regrettably, it also seems as if one in two psychology doctorates ends in a generally superficial book.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-89919-969-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally disjointed—some parts were previously published as magazine pieces—but this tale of trials and triumph is an...
A single woman’s spunky memoir about the hazards and rewards of building a home and a family outside a small Texas town.
Novelist and short-story writer Monroe (English/Texas State Univ.; Shambles, 2004, etc.) adopted Marie, an African-American baby, and raised her in the West Texas countryside where single female professors were an oddity and single white women with black babies were unheard of. The child of divorced parents and with two failed marriages behind her, the author wanted to create a loving family of her own, but first she had to fashion a suitable home out of a rundown cabin she owned. How she became her own contractor and handled the assorted workmen who didn’t know how to deal with a female boss could have been a stand-alone story, but the author integrates it into the larger context of motherly love. Single motherhood is challenging, but when race, misdiagnosed illnesses, surgery and the demands of a busy professional life are added, the struggles are compounded. Some problems—e.g., how to handle Marie’s mass of kinky hair—are not exactly serious, but nevertheless time-consuming and frustrating. “If you’re white,” writes the author, “black hair care is a secret,” and she devotes an entire chapter to her dedicated search for the key to that enigma. Finding a mate amid adverse circumstances—the pickings for a female professional are slim in rural West Texas—presents another problem, but the central issue is the journey of parenting. At the end, Marie is a joyous ten-year-old, teetering on the threshold of independence, and Monroe is on the verge of a new marriage.
Occasionally disjointed—some parts were previously published as magazine pieces—but this tale of trials and triumph is an engaging, poignant read.Pub Date: June 30, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-87074-560-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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