Part two of Gillies’ (Happens Every Day, 2009) chatty, bittersweet chronicle of loss and renewal.
“I had to get my shit together,” writes the disillusioned author, who, in this memoir sequel, plods onward and incrementally upward after separating from her husband in Ohio, taking her two sons and moving in with her parents in New York City. Separation agreement official and wedding band removed (the area replaced with an angry rash), Gillies ruefully struggled with modern city life after picking up the pieces of a shattered life once her husband Josiah left her to marry another woman. Her situation alternately cheerless and “exciting” (the dating scene!), Gillies interviewed schools and babysitters, revived a recurring role on Law & Order and uncomfortably shared split vacations and custody with Josiah for the sake of the boys. Romantically determined to rediscover that coveted “deep purple, electrifying, all-consuming and painful love,” she blind dated via e-mail and tested an old friend’s capacity for love. With the same self-effacing prose found in her debut, Gillies describes her journey from the pain of lost love to the land of the living with humor and compassion. Too often, however, the self-described “drama queen” waxes melodramatically, like she was the first and only survivor of a heart-wrenching divorce. Readers who enjoyed the author’s earlier memoir—and books like it—will find her saga engrossing and heartfelt, though the writing remains scruffy and rambling. Gillies still wants love at first sight (again), but one year later, will it still only take six seconds to happen? Readers will cheer along with the author, whose heart overflows in the conclusion of this enduring story of life after love. The writing is uneven, and the author strains for material in the final chapters, but there’s plenty of love, humor and hope to spare.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4013-4162-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Voice/Hyperion
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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