For funeral-home-cum-dysfunctional-family tales, stick with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (June 2006).
An uneven first memoir offers more undigested anger than wisdom.
Holloway was fixated on death from a young age. Her friend Julie’s parents owned a funeral home, and Holloway liked to sneak into her favorite coffin, lined with pink silk, and imagine her own funeral. Kids with happy childhoods, of course, don’t spend much time thinking about their funerals, and Holloway’s interest in death is something of an escape from her horrible family life. Holloway’s father is abusive, sometimes beating his wife so brutally that the kids fear for her life. Eventually, Holloway’s mother summons some resolve, signs up for college classes and kicks her husband out. But Holloway does not offer the expected my-mother-is-a-phoenix line. No, mom turns out to be thoroughly self-absorbed, and deeply limited in her ability to love her children. Besotted with her new boyfriend, she virtually abandons her daughter, leaving her to make her way through adolescence on her own: “Can’t you be happy for me?” mom asks her teenage daughter. “Why is everything about you? . . . I’ve done you my whole life. This is about me.” Sections of this memoir are eerily lovely, but the overall narrative doesn’t hold together. The funerary imagery that suffuses the opening chapters feels distractingly like a device, a symbol that, in the final analysis, doesn’t have much to do with the family drama. The final third of the book, in which an adult Holloway finally reckons with her childhood, seems like an entirely different book—the voice is different, and the elegant prose of the beginning is replaced by clichés (“Sobs finally came. I didn’t think they ever would”) and self-help psycho-babble (“There was no other way for her to recover but to let the memories come, and I couldn’t do that for her”).
For funeral-home-cum-dysfunctional-family tales, stick with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (June 2006).Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 1-4169-4002-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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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