Though her past seems to her fragmentary and elusive, what she remembers—or imagines—is warmly, gently told.
Glimpses of the iconic writer’s youth.
Oates (Humanities/Princeton Univ.; Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories, 2014, etc.), the highly prolific author and winner of many prestigious literary awards, gathers 28 pieces, most revised from previous publications, into a tender, often moving evocation of the physical and emotional landscapes that have shaped her. Although she has published a volume of journals, an account of her grief after her husband’s sudden death, and many personal essays, Oates portrays herself as a reluctant memoirist. She worries about “violating my own self” and “exposing my very heart,” as well as writing “anything that disturbs, offends, or betrays any other person’s privacy.” Recalling a friend who committed suicide and another who was sexually abused, Oates felt compelled to change details, as well as to create “a quasi-fictitious character named ‘Joyce’—who is almost entirely an observer…more emotionally detached (and more naive) in the memoir than I had been in actual life.” Nevertheless, she reveals some intimate details: a childhood plagued by shyness, self-doubt, and anxiety; recurrent insomnia; the mystery and burden of having an autistic sister; and feeling like an outsider at Syracuse University (“as a scholarship girl I was a spy in the house of mirth”). As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she was “profoundly disillusioned” by her professors’ stultifying approach to literary analysis. She fell in love and married, but her husband remains a shadowy figure, his memory too precious to share with readers. Oates identifies the roots of some works: a serial murder case inspired the much-anthologized “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” and her experience living in Detroit informed several novels. The circuitous, impressionistic narrative returns often to her parents, “extraordinary people morally,” whom she portrays in loving detail.
Though her past seems to her fragmentary and elusive, what she remembers—or imagines—is warmly, gently told.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-240867-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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
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
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