A candidly courageous memoir.
A Filipino-American writer’s debut memoir about how she overcame a personal history fraught with racism, sexual trauma, mental illness, and cancer.
When Talusan (English/Tufts Univ.) and her student-parents moved from Manila to Chicago in the mid-1970s, they never dreamed they would eventually settle in Boston and live a traditional version of the American dream. Her father, Totoy, went on to enjoy a successful medical career, and the family joined the middle class; however, success was both fragile and costly. When Totoy’s student visa expired, the family lived for almost a decade in the shadow of possible deportation. In school, teachers mistook Talusan for Chinese and misrepresented her Filipino heritage. Yet the author thrived, both in the classroom and at home. Then a pedophilic paternal grandfather, whom the author later learned had done “monstrous things to three generations of his family,” began to live on and off with the family. Sexually abused from ages 7 to 13, the author suffered severe trauma that manifested in mysterious skin ailments and, later, insomnia, night terrors, nightmares, dissociation, and suicidal depression. Despite the learning difficulties her inner turmoil caused, she still managed to graduate from Tufts University. During college, Talusan learned that three maternal aunts had been diagnosed with breast cancer while another had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. When she reached her mid-30s and was considering starting a family of her own with a husband she adored, the author voluntarily chose to have a double mastectomy. Later on, she opted for an oophorectomy that ended her dreams of motherhood. A return to the Philippines followed. Once in Manila, the author began a new quest to recover those lost parts of herself that had haunted her “like the insistent ache of a phantom limb.” Moving and eloquent, Talusan’s book is a testament not only to one woman’s fierce will to live, but also to the healing power of speaking the unspeakable.
A candidly courageous memoir.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63206-183-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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