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
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
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
