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THIS IS HOW YOU SAY GOODBYE

Name: THIS IS HOW YOU SAY GOODBYE
Author: Victoria Loustalot
ISBN: 978-1-250-00520-5

A DAUGHTER'S MEMOIR

by Victoria Loustalot ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2013

An intimate portrait of a bittersweet father-daughter relationship.

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A young journalist’s memoir chronicles her trek in search of clues to her father’s hidden life and their much-too-short relationship.

When she was 11, Loustalot’s father died from AIDS. When she was 8, her father regaled her with whimsical talk of the round-the-world trip they would take together. However, he was already infected with HIV, and the journey never became a reality. Fifteen years later, Loustalot embarked on the excursion they had planned together. “Our relationship was still alive,” she writes. “I felt trapped beneath it and all the unnatural questions he left behind. I needed to be set free. I needed to say goodbye.” Angkor Wat in Cambodia, a place her father had mentioned, became the author’s starting point; she believed that “in the far-flung places he had wanted to visit with me were the answers to him…[and] some of the answers to myself.” On her journey, Loustalot also traveled to Stockholm, where her father was a student, and her last stop was Paris, a city that meant so much to her as a little girl: “It was going to be my father’s gift to me. But how do you accept a gift from someone who isn’t here to give it to you?” Sandwiched between travel chapters, the author chronicles life in Sacramento with her mother, her father’s separate life in Santa Cruz with his lover, and, finally, her father’s decline and death. “Who or what would my father have been like if he had grown up in a community and a larger society where being gay wasn’t a bad thing?” she asks. Though she didn’t necessarily find definitive answers, her adventure makes for compelling reading.

An intimate portrait of a bittersweet father-daughter relationship.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-250-00520-5

Page Count: 240

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)