My Literary Profile: A Memoir

Name: My Literary Profile: A Memoir
Author: Helene Pilibosian
ISBN: 978-1929966080

by Helene Pilibosian ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2010

Ambitious amalgam of ethnic and personal history.

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In this debut memoir, an Armenian-American woman details her family background, health issues, and literary education and craft.

Pilibosian was born in 1933 to survivors of the Armenian genocide. Her memoir leads off with “the background our lives were played against, the Armenian lives of my parents before they had immigrated, and our Armenian or American lives here.” She then largely shifts to her saga of growing up in an Armenian-American community in Watertown, Massachusetts. Since she was shy and “lacked ambition to go to college though my marks in school were very good,” Pilibosian went to secretarial school but soon also took humanities courses through Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, ultimately earning a “bachelor equivalent” degree. Early in adulthood, Pilibosian also experienced depression that required psychotherapy and shock treatments. She married an Armenian man, whom her parents recommended and who worked as a typesetter, and she traveled abroad with him as part of trips to visit his family in Lebanon. She gave birth to two children, got editorial work at an Armenian-American newspaper and the Harvard University Printing Office, and wrote poetry that got published. As a young mother, she experienced cardiac arrest during routine surgery, resulting in four days of lost consciousness. Later, in middle age, while walking in a cemetery, she experienced a mystical lifting of mood. Now in retirement, she and her husband run the small press they founded, and her memoir concludes with a discussion of poetry and other writing. Pilibosian sets out to cover a lot of ground in this expansive memoir. Her overview of Armenian cultural history and descriptions of literary studies hold some interest, though at times they also sit rather awkwardly alongside the underlying drama of her medical and mental health issues, which remain a bit mysterious. Pilibosian clearly loves poetry, and her discussions in this area represent some of the more heartfelt expressions in this book. Indeed, there’s something rather haunting about this somewhat stilted memoir, with Pilibosian acknowledging that only later in life did she learn the value of humor, “because my upbringing had been humorless.”

Ambitious amalgam of ethnic and personal history.

Pub Date: June 1, 2010

ISBN: 978-1929966080

Page Count: 311

Publisher: Ohan Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.