A sharply written, heartfelt dating account that proves both enriching and amusing.
Following the untimely death of her husband, a former attorney recounts embarking on an uncertain return to the dating scene in this debut memoir.
The book opens with Weiss lying awake at 4 in the morning obsessing over her newly created profile for an online Jewish dating community. Her husband, George, had died 14 months previously after being diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. Her high school sweetheart, George died at the age of 53, leaving the author a widow four months shy of her 50th birthday. The couple were “introverted only children who never grew up” and who lived in their “own little world of two.” She admits that the prospect of dating again felt like throwing herself into “dire straits.” Weiss recalls her various dating experiences while sharing details of her past life with George. One early date, an Alec Baldwin look-alike, felt compelled to tell her about his former partner’s breast enhancements. After sex, another man told her that he was too restless to sleep with a person in his bed. Weiss later became disillusioned with online dating, dismayed that she had become the equivalent of “the girl in high school the popular guy did in his Trans Am but didn’t take to the prom.” She decided to retreat from the dating community, conceding that the “grinning redhead” in her profile photograph “wasn’t me.” The author instead turned to writing, beginning a master’s degree, and in doing so set out on an unexpected journey to facing and understanding her grief.
Weiss is a dryly amusing writer who tells it like it is: “I watch movies about widowed people and throw cocktail olives at the screen.” Despite the memoir’s somber subject matter, it is peppered with many such moments of levity. The author is unafraid to broach the subject of her “reawakening” sex drive and often does so with a hilarious bluntness: “ ‘Did you use Viagra?’ I asked as I tied the sash on my new black silk bathrobe. I was puzzled by the disconnect between the erection and the ennui.” The book’s humor is balanced by moments of reflection that can waver between the tender and the brutally self-critical: “He was a lover who made me feel alive. I told myself I was being a realist. He loved me in his own way….Now I know I was being an idiot. Not so brave after all.” Weiss also writes carefully sculpted sentences, drawing on simple yet poignant imagery: “I could have told Ben what real pain looked like, about George’s last days, the ones I kept going over, measuring them out like spools of black ribbon.” The senses of searching and disillusionment conveyed here are ones that readers who have lost spouses will closely relate to: “Dating left me wary, and I missed the softness I’d had when I was married, when I was truly loved.” Still, the memoir builds toward a moment of strength and lucidity. This is a deeply personal story but one that Weiss shares with a beguiling openness and wit.
A sharply written, heartfelt dating account that proves both enriching and amusing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-237-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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