An adequate self-help memoir from a woman who wouldn’t seem like the type for self-help books.
A presidential election, a midlife crisis, and psychiatric therapy bring some revelation to the author and perhaps a turning point as well.
Handler (Uganda Be Kidding Me, 2014, etc.) is at a crossroads. She has become the embodiment of the sort of elitist entitlement that she fears helped elect a president she hates. She also seems burdened by what she previously might have considered blessings, living a bubblelike existence with assistants to deal with her every command and inconvenience and few significant responsibilities. “I have the Trump family and their vampiric veneers and horrifying personalities to thank for my midlife crisis,” she writes of the anger and emptiness she felt amid a successful life. She had conquered the comedy circuit, the TV screen, and the bestseller lists, but it no longer seemed enough in the wake of a national crisis. But what could she do? As it became obvious that her inner turmoil ran deeper than Trump, she finally sought therapy. “I was forty-two when I finally saw a real psychiatrist,” she writes, providing an exhaustive account of her therapy that includes pages of re-created dialogue. Handler also details the traumas that have shaped her, mainly the death of her brother when she was 9 and, later, the death of each parent, whom she had loved with such ambivalence and grieved differently than what she thought was expected. Her brother has remained fixed in her memory as the first man who broke her heart, and rather than experience such heartbreak again, she has found deeper, more meaningful relationships with her dogs, who provide much of the comic relief in the text. When her therapist advised, “you have been a human doing, and we need to get you to be a human being,” she winced at the banality. But by the end, she matches him with, “wake up. Take a nap. Laugh. Cry. Rinse. Repeat.”
An adequate self-help memoir from a woman who wouldn’t seem like the type for self-help books.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-51177-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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