A well-reasoned and highly accessible manual for overcoming past trauma and attaining truly unlimited lives.
Former criminal defense attorney Kilcoyne, a survivor of parental abuse, offers a guide to growth and recovery.
The author writes that, as a preteen in the 1980s, she had to care for her younger siblings and mentally ill mother for years while her abusive father served time in federal prison. She presents accounts in this book that will prove difficult for many readers to endure. At one point, for instance, she tells of “the first time, but certainly not the last, I felt responsible for my mother’s survival,” when she was 8 years old and her bedridden, depressed mother pressed the muzzle of a gun to her own temple. Such moments are evenly buoyed, however, with calm explorations into the human psyche, bolstered by solid references to the works of such respected researchers and clinicians as Gabor Maté and Bessel van der Kolk. Her warm, conversational style creates an inviting space for readers to contemplate the sadness and the science of trauma. She insightfully describes the “tightly woven yarns of untruths” that cause people to get “tangled up in [their] stories.” But Kilcoyne maintains an encouraging, motivational tone throughout, and the “Let’s Sum It Up” and “Now It’s Your Turn” sections effectively complement each instructive chapter with prompts to help readers apply what they’ve learned to their own realities. She asserts that the key to healing is having the ability to forgive past transgressions. Kilcoyne refreshingly notes, however, that abusive parents must also take responsibility for their own actions. In addition, she astutely points out that feelings of shame, such as the kind she felt when she was forced to beg neighbors for grocery money, don’t fade without forgiveness. Kilcoyne tells of how her later success as a lawyer didn’t keep her from feeling terrified of being alone. “The trauma didn’t happen because we deserved it,” she writes, but she notes that this fact won’t stop one’s brain from making it seem so. Overcoming such thinking is hard work, and in this book, Kilcoyne helps to demonstrate how that’s possible.
A well-reasoned and highly accessible manual for overcoming past trauma and attaining truly unlimited lives.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781637743904
Page Count: 272
Publisher: BenBella
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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