A brazen account of love and sex made messy, and a bit messily.
Achilles explores unrequited love in the emotion’s most sympathetic poetic form—the sonnet.
How might the speakers of Shakespeare’s poems have dealt with the advent of antidepressants amidst their romantic tribulations? What planes of desire and yearning might Twitter or dating apps supplant for John Keats? For the author, a poetic form “forgot by all not taking English Lit” becomes a 21st century catharsis, diary, and confession. In these sonnets, Achilles records a year of emotional turbulence stemming from a romantic and sexual attachment to her physical therapist that ended poorly. Her style blends the antiquated language readers associate with sonnets (“’Twould be too pat:—prepost’rous! Yet, genteel”) with contemporary phrases and crassness (“One more request:—will you please cum in me?”), lending the speaker a degree of levity even as she bemoans her therapist’s family and her own crumbling marriage. Like her predecessors, the author places the object of her affection on a pedestal (“stainless as a god”) while lamenting her own shortcomings, describing herself as a “fretful, pummeled emu” or “mad hen.” But as their relationship metastasizes, the speaker begins to take stock of the would-be couple’s interpersonal shortcomings and lack of compatibility (and, thankfully, to focus on the pursuit of goals beyond sex and love, like querying agents about her novel). Yet, even as she begins making literary progress and dating new men, she can’t quite relinquish this first flame. While the sonnet form may not be to every reader’s taste or always synchronize with some of Achilles’ more blunt confessions, these verses vividly illustrate the familiar figure of a person tragically in love. The sonnets feel most human when Achilles drops the affected veneer in favor of colloquial terms of our time; for all the high-brow ways of describing rejection and heartbreak, what sums it up better than “this sucks”?
A brazen account of love and sex made messy, and a bit messily.Pub Date: July 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781957372112
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Beltway Editions
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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