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
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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