Coherence is a contrivance of any life story, Chase implies in his candid and insightful memoir; some truths may be shared...
Fragments come together to reveal a life.
Novelist and memoirist Chase (Winkie, 2006, etc.), who chronicled his brother’s death from AIDS in The Hurry-Up Song (1995), constructs this book—partly a documentary of his life, partly a meditation on living—in the form of “aphorism-like statements” which, “when added one to another, might accrue to make some larger statement that will placate despair.” The passages, most not longer than a sentence or two, contain random observations; journal entries; remembered dreams; overheard remarks; and bits of conversations with Chase’s partner, therapist, parents, co-workers and friends. He records losing his baby teeth, rewarded by a dime from the tooth fairy—a rare happy memory of his boyhood. His parents’ contentious marriage, he writes, resulted in his “crippling inner turmoil as an adult.” Emotional turmoil has been fueled, too, by his struggle to admit his homosexuality, “The odd nature of the closet, the open secret, not only to others but to oneself.” Lost “in the forest” of his feelings, he engaged in an affair with an emotionally fragile woman. “But this isn’t merely a story of sexual confusion,” he admits, “rather of self-doubt, which is bigger.” He doubts, above all, his ability to love and to be loved: “As the reader may have noticed, I like to mingle love with panic, self-doubt, and conjecture.” Chase writes movingly of his parents’ serious health problems and deaths and his brother’s tragic last years. He recounts travels to Rome and Egypt with his partner and reflects on the emotional impact of 9/11. Ellipses are as forceful as words: “[L]et the white space between these sentences stand for what couldn’t be seen then; or what can’t be remembered now….”
Coherence is a contrivance of any life story, Chase implies in his candid and insightful memoir; some truths may be shared in words, others hidden between the lines.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0695-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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