Martin seldom goes deep, but the arc of growing self-awareness lends the story both gravity and an odd appeal.
A portrait of the artist as a moody teen.
“When someone suggested I was cool,” writes Martin (Mickey, 2016, etc.) by way of introduction, “I couldn’t help but think, What the fuck is your problem?” It’s a good organizing question as, at only 30, the author takes a hard look at her youth, chronicling the tumult and hardship that modern American life visits on the young, thanks mostly to the regrettable behavior of grown-ups who are scarcely grown themselves: "Seth and my mom fought a lot. Yelling and stomping around, mostly, but sometimes the fights became physically aggressive, and they would throw things or grab each other or make physical threats.” Readers might rightly be flummoxed, in any event, at a book that opens with a confession to having a first sexual experience at the age of 6, courtesy of a terrible slasher/horror film: “I attributed it to Chucky,” Martin writes matter-of-factly, “the evil sentient doll.” The author recounts a life alternately spent alone in her bedroom, making mix tapes and collages (“I knew I had something to say, but I didn’t trust myself to find the right way to say it yet”), and being wistfully, self-doubtfully in love with boys who didn’t know she existed. In other words, it’s the sort of thing with which any sensitive reader who has suffered through adolescence will feel sympathetic recognition. The story levels off in early adulthood, with still more confusions and failings and clumsy moments: “I mostly wanted to eat Jeppe’s burger, because Ian had ordered his with mayonnaise and I hated mayonnaise, but I couldn’t pass up the thrill of eating from two men’s burgers at the same time.” That episode ends on a note of furious discovery that is unexpected but entirely appropriate.
Martin seldom goes deep, but the arc of growing self-awareness lends the story both gravity and an odd appeal.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59376-677-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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