A bittersweet and engrossing literary heirloom filled with family secrets, haunting memories, and striking challenges.
A Vermont-based artist and musician chronicles the serpentine saga of her family’s legacy of struggles and abuse in this debut memoir.
With cleareyed, unvarnished prose and dynamic details, Bedi vividly traces her family lineage back to her ancestors’ arrival on American shores as Slavic immigrants “during the first decade of the twentieth century.” But across this ancestral lore are several dark shadows in the form of murder, suicide, and interfamilial abuse. These tragedies shook the Bedi bloodline to its core and soured the author’s youth and adulthood. Through the use of family tree graphics, photographs, official records, newspaper clippings, and her own memories, the author generously shares the story of her paternal grandfather, Eli, who was murdered in 1917, supposedly at the hands of his wife, Flora. Bedi believes the crime was spurred by a love triangle and that Flora’s lover “actually killed Eli.” When Flora was charged with homicide, her children (including the author’s father) were placed in a Vermont orphanage where they grew up in a neglectful, abusive environment. Bedi’s maternal grandfather killed himself over “the loss of the Czar’s Russia” and “the shame” of incestuous affairs. Her father became a gifted machinist while her mother, Laura, born to Russian immigrants, grew up on a farm and was unpredictable as an adult. Unafraid to reveal the truth about her family’s melodrama, Bedi writes candidly about the bewilderment she felt over her parents’ mismatched marriage in 1937, given that her tempestuous mother “clearly was mentally ill and Dad was an abused orphan.” In this melancholy account, she expresses outrage at Laura and “Gram” for allowing a legacy of intergenerational abuse to proliferate within their family for decades. Despite the hardships experienced by her ancestors that infused her worldview, Bedi’s own history in the final chapter is evoked with generous anecdotes about her immense artistic interests in music education even as her aging mother’s mental state deteriorated further. Upon Laura’s death, the author “cried then, not because she was dead but because the chance for her to realize what she had done was dead too.” Though her mother’s cycle of cruelty died with her, Bedi admits to still struggling toward complete forgiveness and some catharsis as an adult survivor of child abuse, and that her own happiness remains a work in progress.
A bittersweet and engrossing literary heirloom filled with family secrets, haunting memories, and striking challenges.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-5790-8
Page Count: 66
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2019
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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