Holman takes you into life with madness, and the extrication feels only partial. In a word, intense.
Debut memoir incisively etches the daily dread of living with a schizophrenic parent.
In 1975, when Holman was eight years old, her mother took her and a younger sister to live in the family cabin in Kechotan, Virginia, where Mom planned to set up a field hospital. She had been inducted into a secret army, and wounded children would be coming. The author’s mother was experiencing her first, full-blown psychotic episode; it lasted more than three years. She wouldn’t see a psychiatrist until 1981, when her disease had progressed too far for effective treatment, and she is now permanently institutionalized. How could this happen? “Here’s how,” declares Holman. “It could happen to you.” The delineation between madness and sanity, she recalls, was not so clear. There was no context with which to square her mother’s unnerving behavior: the black paint on the windows, the British accent, the rages and mumblings and uncleanliness. Holman’s father had stayed back at the family home, earning a living, hoping that the cabin would do his wife good. Later, he came to live with them when he realized what was happening. The well-intentioned laws protecting patients’ rights kept her mother from being required to accept psychiatric help for many years. “Gingie,” as Holman was nicknamed, learned how to walk softly around her mother, to guard herself; it took a terrible toll and came to haunt her later. Not all is sadness and confusion in this account, but her mother is incomprehensible, the years reflected upon are very, very dark. Holman flips back and forth between those years and the present, as though diving in and then surfacing for air. Readers, too, will find themselves releasing their breath only at the end of the short, remarkably taut chapters. No wonder the portion published last year as “Homesickness” in DoubleTake won a Pushcart Prize.
Holman takes you into life with madness, and the extrication feels only partial. In a word, intense.Pub Date: March 24, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2285-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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