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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
