Blurs the line between imagination and memory so thoroughly that truth struggles for visibility.
Photoshop of horrors from a writer who has suffered countless maladies during her long battle with mental illness.
Hornbacher begins when she is 20 and in one of her self-mutilation phases. Then she looks back, using relentlessly present-tense verbs to provide snapshots of prior disturbing moments, beginning with her frenzies and terrors at age four, advancing through elementary school (“I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old”), then on to cocaine and eating disorders. Psychiatrists and hospitals don’t help much; mental-health professionals are always far less clever than the author. In 1996, while working on her first book (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, 1998), she’s told that she has severe bipolar disorder. Disdaining the meds, mistaking her highs for cures, she ignores the diagnosis. Hornbacher’s prose accelerates when she’s writing about her manic periods, then slows for the depressive lulls. Later, she organizes the text in short sections labeled by year, or season, or month, or sometimes even by hour. They chronicle drinking, random sex, cutting, vomiting, anonymous boyfriends, good and bad husbands, multiple hospitalizations, alternating periods of zany mania and I’m-not-leaving-my-bed depression, multiple meds, clueless shrinks, shock therapy, cocktails of drugs. Somehow Hornbacher goes on a book tour, writes a novel (The Center of Winter, 2005), remembers pages of detailed conversations. People are always telling her that she’s hot and talented. A couple of times she says that madness and electroshock have wiped clean her memory, then she launches into more pages of verbatim witty dialogue and detailed description from days or decades ago. She ends with an epilogue chockablock with clichés like “but there is hope too” and “I am who I am.”
Blurs the line between imagination and memory so thoroughly that truth struggles for visibility.Pub Date: April 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-75445-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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