Indulgent in places but sensitive to the ways in which real life differs from our expectations.
In a debut memoir, Benedict recounts lessons learned from a New Orleans Catholic childhood, three marriages, and a time of depression.
Now a grandmother to 13—thus the nickname “Big Mama”—Benedict considers herself an Everywoman whose trajectory will resonate with the average reader. Her memoir has a wry, confessional tone, perhaps a legacy of her Catholic upbringing. “Life as an only child was often a cold existence,” she recalls, cheered somewhat by movies, her best friend (who was also her young aunt), and the family dog. Her parents, sticklers for grammar and safety, fueled her hypochondria. She then dropped out of college and married early when still a virgin. Even when reliving traumatic memories, Benedict takes a humorous view, describing disappointing early sexual encounters as “like sticking a rubber spatula in my ear.” After having one daughter, the couple divorced; a 15-year second marriage to a philosophy professor produced two more daughters but also ended in divorce. It’s in characterizing midlife that the memoir really takes off. After her father’s decline with dementia and her mother’s death—a sad farewell to a wonderfully stubborn character who insisted on traveling from Indiana to New Orleans on 9/11—Benedict realized that suddenly she and her third spouse were “wearing the big people’s clothes.” This poignant sense of generations turning explains the subtitle’s unusual reinterpretation of the term “coming-of-age.” Faith has become essential to Benedict in recent years, but she’s realized it doesn’t make life perfect. The best coupling of chapters, “The Life I Wanted” and “The Life I Got,” explores this disconnect between idealism and reality. Although the book usually strikes a good balance between the general and the particular, the sets of lists—of activities that helped alleviate depression or random memories of her parents and husband—are a clumsy way of inserting sometimes-irrelevant information. However, apart from a few unfortunate errors (“bear my soul” and “Virginia Wolfe”), the writing is solid, and the black-and-white family photographs are a nice addition.
Indulgent in places but sensitive to the ways in which real life differs from our expectations.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5043-3728-1
Page Count: 184
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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