Much different from most musicians’ memoirs and of much interest to all who wrestle to understand tragedies of their own.
Country music singer Moorer recounts a scarifying, life-defining event: the murder-suicide of her parents.
“Someone can take himself out, fine, but they leave behind those who love them with a never-ending list of questions and a shadow hanging over everything, like a dark triptych in the middle of the room.” So writes Moorer, who, like her sister, fellow country singer Shelby Lynne, has been living for more than 30 years with the memory of the gunshots by which her father killed her mother and then turned the gun on himself. Moorer is her own Rashomon, exploring that terrible event from every possible side, examining the living, recalling the words of the dead, concluding that, given the abuse and alcohol that flowed through the relationship, the end seemed inevitable. The dark triptych of which she writes represents a hazy unknowability, the list of questions keys that can never be recovered since the answers can never come. Affecting in its cleareyed depiction of the lives that are shattered all around the immediate victims, including her then-14-year-old self, Moorer’s account examines the lingering effects—e.g., mistrust and a habit of leaving relationships before they’re over. “Let me store resentments like I’m canning vegetables for the winter” she writes, “so I’ll slowly develop a deep, smoldering hatred in return for my deep disappointment.” Yet she tried to think of herself in terms other than the daughter of a murderer, the daughter of a murder victim. There is much wisdom in her experience as well as in her reflections on what she has read and heard, as with her note that one great step forward is to “give up hope for a better past.” That her past is worse than most has posed countless challenges, it’s evident in these pages, but Moorer confronts it with an unblinking honesty that is sometimes long on self-doubt and short on comfort.
Much different from most musicians’ memoirs and of much interest to all who wrestle to understand tragedies of their own.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-306-92268-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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