A fever dream of darkly personal memories and musings from the shadowy corners of sexual violence and mental illness.
A candid, autobiographical scrapbook from a young woman navigating manic depression.
In her forthright debut, Washuta intimately chronicles her ongoing struggle with the triple threat of a 2005 sexual assault, bipolar disorder, and the powerful antipsychotic medication prescribed to balance her mind and body (“chemical torture is the trade-off”). In each creatively imagined chapter, the author delivers explicit insight into her life: a bibliography of influential books; reflections on her college years at the University of Maryland, where she conducted sexual habit studies and imbibed vodka-laced “liquid dinners”; the conundrum of obtaining a sexual education while in Catholic school; her hilariously footnoted Match.com online dating profile; and a harrowing medicine-cabinet glossary of her prescription “bipolar buffet.” Washuta then graphically describes her sexual escapades in Seattle, where she was able to “absorb every one-night stand into my body and keep it there.” Other sections find the author personally identifying with TV’s Law & Order, Kurt Cobain and Britney Spears. In alternating chapters, she discusses the internal and external impacts of her Indian heritage as a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe (“It took some time to get the hang of being simultaneously white and Indian”) and how being raped altered her sense of identity and exacerbated her bouts of bipolar disorder ("Before I knew I was bipolar, and could settle into that, I had the rape. It was bloody and violent and it was an injustice of the kind my ancestors knew"). In a reliably honest, original and frank fashion, Washuta’s ruminations lift the veil of her chronic (and highly medicated) bouts of mental illness to reveal the confused, frenetic and often traumatic reality of living with overwhelming bouts of depression and mania.
A fever dream of darkly personal memories and musings from the shadowy corners of sexual violence and mental illness.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59709-969-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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