A slim addition to a long bookshelf on depression.
A writerly account of the downward spiral of clinical depression.
Writing about one’s own depression presents unique challenges. Sinking into the abyss typically renders the writer incapable of writing, so such memoirs are almost invariably written well after the fact, with the writer describing what, at the time, seemed an affectless void. Prize-winning novelist Guterson (Ed King, 2011, etc.) differs from many in knowing specifically what triggered his depression and exactly when it started. He was in Washington, D.C., during the attacks of 9/11 and found himself not only devastated, but wondering how others could resume their lives, almost as if nothing had happened: “Anyone not despondent, I believed, was wearing blinders. The rightness of unhappiness was obvious and clear. The only reasonable response to the world was an overwhelming and excruciating sadness; everything else was willful delusion.” Reasonable enough, but neither his drive home to Washington state nor the months that followed lifted his spirits. Guterson consulted therapists, took pills and pondered suicide. It’s impossible to criticize the recovery and catharsis reflected in this manuscript, but it’s plain that he’s no longer at a loss for words and that those words seem self-consciously literary. Of discussing his condition with his family, he writes, “There is such a thing as filial indulgence and a manner of discourse possible between siblings that’s possible nowhere else. In other words, our dialogue was fraught with complication to the point of a compelling Freudian mootness.” Only in the last few pages does he turn the corner toward a recovery more gradual and less specifically causal (pills? time? love?) than the shock that blindsided him.
A slim addition to a long bookshelf on depression.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8041-6925-7
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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