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 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
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