Deep truths underlie this fragmented, compelling narrative, which leaves readers wishing only the best for its harrowed...
“Imagine you don’t fit anywhere, not even in your own head”: A Nigerian immigrant and debut author writes of mental illness and its staggering challenges.
Catapult contributing editor Ikpi opens with the suggestion that the fractured memories to follow in her memoir may or may not be true. “The trick to lying,” she writes, “is to tell people that you’re a bad liar because then they’ll believe what you say.” What she has to say is sometimes heartbreaking, as she recounts a search for reliable memories when she has so few of them. “I need to prove to you that I didn’t enter the world broken,” she writes before admitting the paucity of fact in a whirl of impressions and sensations. What she does know is that she doesn’t know. Things were kept from her, familial facts were forgotten, genealogies erased, and unpleasant truths swept aside. Little things proved overwhelming: the discovery, for instance, that “the twins from my favorite movie, The Parent Trap, were actually one person.” If the distance from Nigeria to Oklahoma was great, the leap to adulthood in New York was greater. Depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety proved to be formidable opponents, isolation a constant even surrounded by millions of people. One of the most affecting parts of the book is a simple diarylike reconstruction of a long day that began and ended with an airplane flight, a day of sleeplessness, hunger, and worry (“this doesn’t happen to normal people”). Other strong moments in this relentlessly honest narrative recount failed love (“he was the only one I regret being too broken for”), the shame of not being the immigrant success her parents had hoped for, and the quest for wholeness amid a cornucopia of medications targeting a long list of troubles that she expresses simply: “I don’t feel good."
Deep truths underlie this fragmented, compelling narrative, which leaves readers wishing only the best for its harrowed author.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-269834-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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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