An often evocative and lyrical reflection on family mysteries.
Myers’ (Don’t Call Me Mother, 2013, etc.) second memoir traces a difficult family history, set against the sweeping landscape of the Great Plains.
As a child, the author learned that she could find temporary solace through music by playing the cello; later, as an adult, she expressed her innermost feelings through her paintings; and finally, in midlife, she became a therapist and discovered the cathartic healing of memoir writing. She has spent decades researching her maternal family history, trying to understand what caused her mother, Jo’tine, to hand her over to her grandmother, Frances (nicknamed “Lulu”), to raise—and what caused Lulu to give Jo’tine to her own grandmother, Josephine, for many critical years. Myers was 4 years old when she began living with Lulu, who, with one interruption, would raise her until she left for college. When she was 5, however, she lived with her cousin’s family, where she remained for a year. It was there, she says, that she was first sexually abused. Jo’tine and Frances, she writes, had a troubled relationship that was never resolved, and although Lulu was a nurturing, loving caregiver during Myers’ early years, she became increasingly strict and demanding as the years progressed—even resorting to beatings, according to the author. The deeply emotional narrative has a tendency toward repetition, and readers are likely to grow impatient as they wait for the author to state what they’ll have already surmised—that her mother and grandmother both suffered from mental illness. But the volume does intricately layer the detailed narrative with philosophical and mystical musings as well as poetic passages regarding Myers’ relationship with her Great Plains surroundings: “There was always the wind. It whirled and swirled, kicking up dust and revealing, if we cared to look for it, secrets just under the surface, particles of bone and earth that shimmered from the great inland sea that covered mid-America thousands of years ago.”
An often evocative and lyrical reflection on family mysteries.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-216-1
Page Count: 330
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
