A well-balanced panoply of family-centric musings from authors conflicted between responsibility and retribution.
A chorus of noteworthy memoirists reflects on the ethical consequences of airing dirty laundry.
“With family stories, the stakes are always high,” writes Castro (English and Ethnic Studies/Univ. of Nebraska; Island of Bones, 2012, etc.), who published her harrowing experiences as the abused child of fundamentalist parents. Naturally, she has firsthand knowledge of the memoirist’s internal struggle: a personal obligation to convey an honest narrative while straddling the thin line between authenticity and oversharing. This conundrum of writing within the “self-disclosing genre of our reality-hungry era” is pondered throughout 25 reflective essays from a wide-ranging group of writers. The four-part collection opens with essays personifying the ethical boundaries authors like emergency room physician Paul Austin must skirt when divulging a life working in a high-pressure environment while raising a disabled child. Novelist Paul Lisicky discusses the fragile “line between life and art” after his published remembrances became surprisingly offensive to his aunt, a reaction similar to that of gay memoirist Rigoberto González’s grandparents to his poignant, revelatory autobiography. Wrestling with artistic integrity, despite the pain caused to others, is also a theme running through the collection, along with the expected preponderance of the matriarchal mother figure. Several authors who share their experiences are also creative writing instructors, and they offer advice on crafting an effective, epiphanic memoir. All of the entries deserve attention, though some are disappointingly brief, while others excessively agonize over unresolved emotional baggage. “Such is the calamity of authorship and authenticity in revealing secrets,” writes Allison Hedge Coke of her process in exorcising personal demons onto the printed page. Other contributors include Ariel Gore, Alison Bechdel and Dinty W. Moore.
A well-balanced panoply of family-centric musings from authors conflicted between responsibility and retribution.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8032-4692-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.
An analysis of our emotions and the skills required to understand them.
We all have emotions, but how many of us have the vocabulary to accurately describe our experiences or to understand how our emotions affect the way we act? In this guide to help readers with their emotions, Brackett, the founding director of Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, presents a five-step method he calls R.U.L.E.R.: We need to recognize our emotions, understand what has caused them, be able to label them with precise terms and descriptions, know how to safely and effectively express them, and be able to regulate them in productive ways. The author walks readers through each step and provides an intriguing tool to use to help identify a specific emotion. Brackett introduces a four-square grid called a Mood Meter, which allows one to define where an emotion falls based on pleasantness and energy. He also uses four colors for each quadrant: yellow for high pleasantness and high energy, red for low pleasantness and high energy, green for high pleasantness and low energy, and blue for low pleasantness and low energy. The idea is to identify where an emotion lies in this grid in order to put the R.U.L.E.R. method to good use. The author’s research is wide-ranging, and his interweaving of his personal story with the data helps make the book less academic and more accessible to general readers. It’s particularly useful for parents and teachers who want to help children learn to handle difficult emotions so that they can thrive rather than be overwhelmed by them. The author’s system will also find use in the workplace. “Emotions are the most powerful force inside the workplace—as they are in every human endeavor,” writes Brackett. “They influence everything from leadership effectiveness to building and maintaining complex relationships, from innovation to customer relations.”
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-21284-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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