A tender memoir.
An award-winning novelist recounts his sickly boyhood and other difficult early-life circumstances.
As a child, Johnston was beset by chronic illness: a persistent cough, insomnia, and a digestive problem so severe that he couldn’t keep food down—ailments that were exacerbated by his living conditions. He and his family moved 23 times by the time he was 7, running away when they couldn’t pay the rent. “We boys never knew when we were leaving or exactly where we were moving next,” he recalls, “just that we were always one car breakdown or appliance repair away from having an eviction notice slipped beneath our door in the middle of the night.” The author focuses on one precarious year when the family lived in an “old, small, rundown, drafty,” leaky house in the small town of Goulds, Newfoundland, where their mother had grown up and where her parents lived across the street. Although Johnston’s father was an inspector for the fisheries department, he frittered away his salary on drink. His mother, Jennie, felt mortified that her weak and skinny son seemed evidence of bad mothering. Too sick to go to school, he was cared for by his grandmother Lucy, a woman steeped in “ignorance and superstition, magic, black magic, ghosts and Holy Ghosts and archangels the size of galaxies, wart- and cancer-curing Holy Water, all mixed up with fairies and witches and sprites and goblins.” Still, Lucy offered her grandson love and reassurance: “You were put on earth for a reason, although it wouldn’t surprise me if God himself can’t remember what it is.” Jennie and Lucy believed in the power of prayer, not medicine: Only after the author collapsed with a life-threatening fever did Jennie, reluctantly, take him to a doctor. That visit set him on a path to one specialist after another, all of whom came up with diagnoses—a heart murmur, pleurisy—and prescribed pills that the family couldn’t afford. Johnston recounts his childhood with affection and humor. Happily, and somewhat miraculously, he grew up to be a healthy adult.
A tender memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781586423629
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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