A poignantly candid memoir about navigating the often rocky shores of family.
A former editor and literary agent tells the story of how her mother’s unexpected death forced her to come to terms with a tragic family past.
When Edelstein’s healthy 68-year-old mother suddenly drowned while snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef, her world upended. Not only did she have to confront the conflicting feelings she had long harbored toward her emotionally distant parent; she also had to process unresolved grief for a brother, Danny, who had committed an especially violent act of suicide 15 years earlier. The author’s mother had been a woman for whom order meant everything and whose love came with a “debilitating web of anxiety” that entangled those who were close to her. No one could speak the truth of what they were feeling; “everyone had to act like our world was perfectly okay.” It was her sweet, funny brother who helped Edelstein navigate the treacherous field around her mother. But as he grew older, his gentle manner gave way to meanness and irresponsibility, which she later recognized as symptoms of the illness that caused Danny to kill himself at age 22. Over time, the author learned that both her mother’s and brother’s behaviors came from an inherited tendency toward depression and bipolar disorder that had affected her mother’s father, who committed suicide at age 50 after multiple failed attempts; and her mother’s brother, who also committed midlife suicide. By revisiting her family’s past, Edelstein gradually began to understand that her mother’s maddening rigidity came from being “surrounded by suicide on all sides.” Determined not to let her emotional burdens drown her or destroy her marriage and family, she began the courageous task of breaking the silence around her family’s past to her own children. Touching and honest, Edelstein’s book offers keen analysis of the mother-daughter relationship while probing the perennial question of what makes humans choose life or death.
A poignantly candid memoir about navigating the often rocky shores of family.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59709-605-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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