A searingly candid memoir.
A popular blogger’s tragicomic account of how early motherhood and marriage propelled her into a cycle of drug and alcohol addiction from which she narrowly escaped.
Hanchett, the creator of the Renegade Mothering blog, was a senior in college when she discovered that she was pregnant by Mac, a 19-year-old rancher’s son she had been dating for three months. Feeling she had let down a family that believed she would “do something impressive in life,” the author gave birth to a baby girl, married Mac, and settled into uneasy domesticity, which she made more manageable by “remain[ing] drunk about 40 percent of my waking hours.” Eventually diagnosed with postpartum depression, she tried to ease the tedium and isolation of stay-at-home life by taking a job as a receptionist. Instead, she found herself drinking more heavily and fighting with Mac, who drank in codependent solidarity with her. She left Mac and then returned and became pregnant again, vowing to make her family life work. Instead, she and Mac continued drinking and doing drugs together. After a psychiatrist diagnosed her with borderline personality disorder, Hanchett began what would become an ongoing search for a “rehab that would cure me.” But she found no relief. Her clinic stays became islands of temporary sobriety in a life that seemed to become increasingly dedicated to self-destruction. Her body and marriage on the verge of irrevocable collapse, the author unexpectedly found salvation in the counsel of a fellow recovering alcoholic she named “Good News Jack.” His brutal honesty forced Hanchett to realize that in order to rebuild her life, she had to let go of reason and put her faith in “the pulse holding the stars…[and] the thing that makes me alive beyond breath.” By turns painful and funny, the book explores the pressures of modern motherhood while chronicling one woman’s journey toward acceptance of her own limitations and imperfections.
A searingly candid memoir.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-50377-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
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
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