A scattershot glimpse into the American magazine scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
A former Esquire fiction editor recounts her time at the magazine and her working relationship and romance with David Foster Wallace.
Miller (The Coast of Akron, 2005) was 25 with three years’ experience in editorial assistant roles at GQ when her boss became editor-in-chief at Esquire in 1997 and hired her to be the latter’s fiction editor. During her tenure, which ended in 2006, she edited four stories by Wallace, “the fiction writer with whom I’d work the most frequently at the magazine.” For a time, they were a couple. In her debut memoir, Miller recounts her years at Esquire, her struggle to grapple with working for a men’s publication in which the “representation of women was problematic at best,” and her relationship with Wallace. Many passages movingly recount the sexism she endured, such as when, after she got the job, a male literary agent told her, “You don’t have any authority to do this job, you know”; or when she discovered that then-unknown Dave Eggers, an Esquire colleague, received twice her salary for similar work. Unfortunately, much of the narrative is unfocused and suffers from weak prose—e.g., “He obviously didn’t exactly hold me in terribly high regard”; “my grandfather, who had died six years before, was still dead.” Many passages read like lines from a romance novel: “His hand was firm, and soft, and warm”; “David promised he’d call. I hoped he’d call. I needed him to call.” Despite her focus on Wallace, we never get a satisfying sense of what made him a unique writer. For the most complete and insightful portrait of Wallace, readers should turn to D.T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. Miller’s experience as a woman at a male-dominated magazine is unique, but her rendering is flawed.
A scattershot glimpse into the American magazine scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-268241-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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