An engaging remembrance of moving through tragedy and grief with love.
A young couple’s lives are forever changed by a fatal disease in this memoir.
McCann, the author of this touching remembrance, was 15 years old in 1990 and staying at her family’s Vermont summer cabin when she met and fell in love with handsome, witty, and popular 17-year-old Curtis Vance. Their romance was on-again, off-again as Vance’s attention strayed to another girl, leaving the ever faithful author crushed by his inability to commit. Later, in their mid-20s, the two finally became a committed couple and moved in together. Soon afterward, Vance noticed some weakness and other odd physical symptoms. Before long, they found out that members of his family, dating back to the early 1800s, had been ravaged by a rarely discussed but aggressive form of Lou Gehrig’s disease called familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The story then chronicles Curtis’ maturation into a person who was unafraid to love deeply. The theme running throughout the story is that the couple was, in the author’s words, “learning to live while preparing to die.” As the 25-year-old Vance gradually lost his ability to walk and talk, members of the community where he grew up in Danville, Vermont, held weekly healing circles and showed the couple their love. Eventually the pair was forced to make a hard decision when it became clear that Curtis’ ability to breathe would inevitably fail. Over the course of this memoir, the author makes her account vivid with exquisite detail even though the events of the story happened more than 20 years ago. The intervening decades allowed the author to put the traumatic period into mature perspective, and her book effectively allows readers to see how the author continued on with her own life after a long period of grief: “The darkness that enveloped me for so long now only occasionally becomes greater than its forever state of brewing. I make the conscious choice to keep it at bay by concentrating on the sliver of light.” The prose throughout is eloquent but never flashy, allowing the story to shine through.
An engaging remembrance of moving through tragedy and grief with love.Pub Date: May 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1954493261
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Green Heart Living Press
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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