A strong, important account of self-preservation.
A debut memoir examines narcissism and women’s rights.
McKneally grew up in New York state during the 1940s and ’50s, the eldest of a large Roman Catholic family. She opens her book with a line from her father: “No daughter of mine is going to college!” The author does attend college, however, with her father’s signature on the application. This dynamic repeats many times: her father and then her husband, Dan, telling her she can’t study, work, parent—do anything—and McKneally proving them wrong. She met Dan in college. He drank too much and survived cancer but was also a rising star in the business world. She believed that “God had intended” them to be together. Signs of Dan’s controlling personality surfaced early. He insisted she quit her job, move to Chicago (his hometown), and prepare to have 10 children. When Dan was invited to the Aspen Institute, McKneally followed as “wife of.” Although not officially allowed to speak in sessions, she did indeed provide valuable input. The couple eventually had five children, and the author was offered jobs, but Dan refused to let her work: “What could you ever do?” Dan became physically abusive at home, and McKneally descended deep into depression. In therapy, she realized Dan was the problem but felt blocked from divorce by Catholicism, the return of Dan’s cancer, and his crumbling career. In the mid-’70s, she finally secured a divorce and recovered in part through art. McKneally’s voice is assured and intelligent. Even when conveying her confusion and depression, her writing is convincing. She tells her story in vivid scenes and dialogue that draw readers into her home, the Aspen Institute, the therapist’s office, and other settings. In addition, she deftly conveys the social atmosphere and expectations of the ’60s and ’70s (“ ‘Equal rights’ was merely a murmur, and feminism in my world poked its head through the status quo only to be stepped on and shoved back down”). To appeal to a broader audience, her book might have expanded on the issues of women, work, abuse, and mental illness during these decades and trimmed some personal events and details. Nonetheless, her story remains engaging and inspiring.
A strong, important account of self-preservation.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-974286-71-3
Page Count: 302
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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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