A powerful coming-of-age story about life as an adoptee.
Jones reflects on her adoption, her childhood, and her search for identity in this debut memoir.
“I am seventy-seven years old,” the author writes in an introductory note, “and there is one thing that I must do before it is too late, and that is to share my odd, but true story.” She was adopted at the age of 4 months by Ralph and Lucinda Beare, and her experience initially seems like every orphan’s dream. Her first memory was of her doting adoptive mother reading her Valentina Wasson’s classic children’s book, The Chosen Baby (1939), and the family’s living room was decorated with a picture of three bears: a papa, a mama, and a baby. Her adoptive father was one of the most respected figures in their smalltown home of Celina, Ohio, where he served as the county doctor. Strangers on the street, she recalls, would regale her with tales of how her dad had delivered their children or saved their grandfather’s life. However, as the memoir’s title implies, her idyllic childhood as Dr. Beare’s daughter came with an erasure of her own identity, and she tells of struggling to live up to the expectations that came with being part of the family. Paralleling this narrative is a recurring, italicized internal monologue of the author as a child, which reveals anxious, trauma-fueled thoughts: “Didn’t the home have any babies that look like them?” the author asks as she compares her “ugly freckles” and red hair with the dark hair of her parents. When her mom scolded her for not shutting an outside door with a colloquialism (“Were you born in a barn?”), Jones tells herself, “I wasn’t born. I was adopted.”
Another central theme in this wide-ranging remembrance is the role of Catholicism in a small Midwestern town. The author tells of how the cultural and moral ethos of the faith shaped her upbringing, education, and even her teenage romantic life. There are vignettes that give the response of local nuns to the election of John F. Kennedy, for instance, and of her father’s bewilderment when she didn’t eat fish on a Friday. Jones effectively bookends the memoir with memories of the day her father died in 1981, in which she poignantly reflects on her conflicting emotions: She was consumed by grief, but she also felt free to pursue a new identity without the expectations and doubts that came with being “Dr. Beare’s daughter.” Readers will also find that the author is brutally honest about her own struggles with self-esteem: “I was of no good to my husband and children because I was of no good to myself,” she observes at one point. In these pages, she offers a compelling work that will be of particular interest to adoptive parents and children. In one revealing moment, for instance, she remembers a therapist asking her, “Why are you here?” Jones intended to answer that she wanted help to process her grief, but the words that came out were simply, “I was adopted.”
A powerful coming-of-age story about life as an adoptee.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9798989097807
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Lou-Jan Press
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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