An affectionate, insightful inquiry into a troubled life and untimely death.
A mother’s heart-rending recollection of her daughter, who died of an accidental heroin overdose.
Schiller (Watermark, 2016) opens with an affecting chapter that contrasts the joyful first day of her daughter Giana’s life in January 1980 with the day in January 2014 when she received a phone call from The Rose House, a treatment program in Colorado, informing her that Giana had been found dead. The author, addressing Giana directly, wonders what might have changed the course of her life or if her lot was somehow predetermined: “I wonder now if there was a little nugget inside you, something that would burst into heartache later.” Perhaps childhood asthma and allergies eventually led Giana down a dark path: In a household of seven, she learned that she got attention for being ill and would later have inpatient stays for anorexia as well as substance abuse. The beginning of the memoir remembers Giana’s happier days, including private Quaker schooling, competitive swimming, and enrolling at the University of Vermont. Giana returned to school to study veterinary nursing when her beloved dog Abby had health challenges; Schiller speculates that Abby’s death from cancer may have tipped Giana into “pain-quelling drug use.” In melancholy, striking prose, the author outlines her regret—not being more assertive or asking her daughter difficult questions. The cycles of treatment, recovery, and relapse that follow (perhaps inevitably) become repetitive, but fragments of second-person narration develop a genuine intimacy that keeps readers engaged with Giana’s story. Excerpts from Giana’s journals and letters and black-and-white family photos add context and texture. A minute-by-minute account of Giana’s final day—an ordinary set of errands and conversations, documented by her sister, Louisa—is a sobering reminder that death can be shockingly abrupt. In the somewhat anticlimactic final chapters, Schiller records her experiences of Didion-esque magical thinking about her daughter’s continued presence, and she argues passionately for the decriminalization of drugs.
An affectionate, insightful inquiry into a troubled life and untimely death.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68463-008-0
Page Count: 245
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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