A real page-turner, full of incredible, horrifying tales enveloping readers in Blackburn’s tumultuous existence.
British writer Blackburn (My Animals & Other Family, 2007, etc.) recalls an atypical upbringing.
Commendably, she manages to find riotous humor in the erratic, often hurtful behavior she endured throughout her peculiar childhood. When she once asked her mother, a painter named Rosalie, what piles were, Rosalie simply bent over and showed her exactly what they looked like. Blackburn’s father, an alcoholic writer named Thomas, divorced Rosalie when their daughter was 12. Despite the title, the memoir primarily focuses on the author’s decaying relationship with her mother, drawing on Blackburn’s razor-sharp memory and youthful diary entries. The first signs of trouble in her parents’ marriage came when her father began an affair with the Irish painter Francis Bacon. This event, like others in the book, is recalled in an explosive and richly descriptive fashion. Encounters with her parents were frequently marked by lewd and suggestive remarks on such topics as Blackburn’s breasts, the loss of her virginity and her mother’s graphically described sexual exploits. Rosalie raised Julia following the divorce, and much of the narrative depicts the eccentric behavior she inflicted on her daughter and a succession of lodgers. Indeed, the lodgers played a large role in the battle between mother and daughter, with many of them becoming objects of desire for both. At one point, Blackburn began an affair with her mother’s lover, a much older man named Geoffrey, and ultimately moved in with him, creating a huge schism with Rosalie. Later chapters recount Geoffrey’s suicide and her father’s worsening alcoholism and death in 1977. Throughout the book, each chapter concludes with faxes to the author’s now-husband describing moments in her mother’s terminal decline and death in 1999.
A real page-turner, full of incredible, horrifying tales enveloping readers in Blackburn’s tumultuous existence.Pub Date: July 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42474-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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