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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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