A poignant, searching memoir of self-discovery.
A novelist’s account of her early life growing up Mormon in Utah and the family memories she kept hidden from herself.
Freeman (The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, 2007, etc.) was the sixth child and second girl in a family of eight children raised by a “stoic…resourceful, and very loving” mother and a moody, unpredictable, physically abusive father. The people around her in Ogden were mostly Mormon, but as the family “wild girl,” it was the “heathens” and rebels who interested her most. Her eldest brother, Bob, was the first to escape the family when he joined the Navy at age 17. Though he died less than two years later, he still managed to marry a Catholic woman and father a “damaged” child with her; Freeman's devoutly Mormon parents would eventually shun both. Meanwhile, the author struck up friendships with non-Mormon girls who smoked, drank, and flirted with boys. At age 17, she married John Thorn, the Mormon boyfriend and BYU graduate her beautiful, “ladylike” elder sister had rejected and whom she found attractive precisely because he had been with her sibling. She became pregnant almost immediately and gave birth to a son with a heart defect. Freeman followed her husband to a job as a counselor at a Minnesota liberal arts college, where she befriended a group of young intellectuals. When the opportunity for an affair with the pediatric cardiologist treating her son arose, Freeman accepted it, just as she accepted returning home to her parents in the wake of her eventual divorce. The author’s story is highly readable, but its true power derives from the realizations she had later in life when she asked John to help her answer two questions: why she had married so young and chosen him as her husband. John’s answers revealed that while she may have succeeded in suppressing memories—which John brought forward—of her father’s cruelty, Freeman could never entirely free herself of the Mormon faith she had always questioned.
A poignant, searching memoir of self-discovery.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-307-90861-2
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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