An emotionally astute account of the oppressive confines of an unhappy family life.
In this novelistic memoir, a woman chronicles her anguish under her father’s tyranny and her escape through education.
Grace Marie Hall is born in Arkansas in the 1940s, the middle child chronologically sandwiched between her older brother, Joe Buck, and her younger sister, Violet. Her family is poor, but Grace doesn’t really feel the weight of deprivation until she goes to school, meets her peers, and indulges in comparisons. Nevertheless, the bane of her existence isn’t financial scarcity but her father’s mercurial temper and despotic rule of the household, with his autocratic style of governance routinely permitted by a neurotically acquiescent mother. Grace finds a reprieve from the dull monotony of rural routines in books and vows to go to college, her ticket out of Arkansas, much to her father’s chagrin. But she marries Duddie Loomis, a man she met in grade school, and bears a child, a development that temporarily waylays her plans. Grace’s marriage is a tempestuous one—her rabidly racist husband is prone to violence—and she eventually returns home with her daughter. She ultimately manages to finish college and graduate school, a decade-long process, and escapes to California, where she meets Nick, a doctor and a delightfully stable human being. But Grace keeps getting pulled back to the dysfunctional home from which she delivered herself to care for her mother, addled with Alzheimer’s, and to help when Violet is beset by mental illness and cancer and when her father dies. In her engrossing work, Miller (The French, 1983) writes with both zest and charm. She laces the story with insightful aperçus about the claustrophobia of rural Arkansas while celebrating the power of literature (“I lived in these books, and they lived in my head and heart long after I was forced to put them down and do my homework or chores”). The memoir is only slightly fictionalized and follows closely the actual journey of the author, and as a result reads more like a remembrance than a novel. In either case, the tale remains intrepidly candid and offers a well-crafted peek at rustic life.
An emotionally astute account of the oppressive confines of an unhappy family life.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-339-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2018
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
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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