A modest, spirited, and sometimes-captivating memoir.
A warm recounting of a bumpy journey to surprising success.
In some ways, Monroe’s (English/Texas State Univ.; On the Outskirts of Normal: Forging a Family Against the Grain, 2010, etc.) candid memoir reads like a country ballad: a down-and-out woman, working at gritty jobs, gets entangled with Mr. Completely, Laughably Wrong; the brakes on her pickup truck repeatedly fail; she lives in one grungy apartment after another. But her unexpected story is far from a cliché. With no particular direction in her life, she started college, first aiming for an associate degree and then deciding to go on—and on, finally earning a doctorate. Despite her father’s warning that she would become un-marriageable, she came to realize that education “makes you good company for yourself.” Being alone with her books, though, was not all she wanted. At 24, she married a musician with “faux-bucolic ideals and soundtrack to match.” After speedily divorcing him, she became pregnant by a man happy to marry her. By the time of the wedding, she had had a miscarriage and realized, too, that her husband was a slacker with grandiose plans, a violent temper, and a penchant for lying. Although they stayed together too long and Monroe had to support them both, she was determined to complete her degree and creative writing dissertation. Not only did she graduate, but her stories won a prestigious Flannery O’Connor Award for work, the judges said, that “comprised a world, an iconography.” She then found a teaching position at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, moving to Texas State University in 1992. Monroe lightly sketches her adopted African-American daughter, the subject of her last memoir, and she celebrates her happy third marriage to a man “who knew that running a tidy, books-balanced household where my child came first was as important, or more important, than my career.”
A modest, spirited, and sometimes-captivating memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8203-4874-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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