Blurring the line between biography and memoir, these essays consider the power of public personalities to illuminate one’s...
Eight writers reflect on women who fascinate them.
“Who do you think about (maybe a little too often), who challenges, inspires, or outrages you? Who are you obsessed with?” These questions inform this collection of essays, edited by Feminist editorial director Scholder (editor: Dr. Rice in the House, 2007, etc.), about famous women whom the writers see as personal icons. As they investigate the women’s lives, the essayists reflect on their own identities and what motivates their attractions. Novelist Mary Gaitskill writes about porn artist Linda Lovelace, whose public persona, Gaitskill believes, has been bowdlerized. Herself a victim of a violent rape, Gaitskill feels a visceral understanding of the “hellish combination” of anger and fear that Lovelace is likely to have experienced. “As much as anything,” she writes, “her story is about enormous loneliness and the struggle to survive, a condition so much bigger than how she was seen.” Writer and gardener Jill Nelson is incredulous that young women today have no idea who Aretha Franklin was—a woman who, for Nelson, embodied “liberated empowerment or broke down heartache, with a sultry dose of lust thrown in.” Historian, classical singer and restaurateur Hanne Blank is fascinated by food writer M.F.K. Fisher, who represented “style and self-assurance” and “sensual, unpretentious worldliness.” Blank continues: “Calm assertion is nine tenths of authority. Emotion is more potent without melodrama, or even exclamation points.” Justin Vivian Bond focuses on supermodel Karen Graham, the advertising face of Estée Lauder, to explore her own identity as “a small-town transperson…sure that what I wanted was to escape into a world of glamour and elegance, taste and refinement.” Other contributions include Rick Moody on singer Karen Dalton, musician Johanna Fateman on Andrea Dworkin, and novelist Kate Zambreno on Kathy Acker.
Blurring the line between biography and memoir, these essays consider the power of public personalities to illuminate one’s deepest sense of self.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-55861-866-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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