A raw and eloquently unflinching memoir.
An Oakland-based writer and editor tells the story of a passionate but co-dependent long-term affair that ended her marriage and became the “disease” that nearly destroyed her.
Aron was a teenager just out of high school when she first met K, a man in his 20s, in San Francisco. Newly arrived from New Jersey, she had come to California to “[collect] experiences” and escape a home life that, though loving, had also become chaotic. Their romance, which K ended, lasted only a few months, but it left her feeling “sick with [a] love” she never forgot. Aron eventually returned to the East Coast to attend college and deal with the fallout surrounding a drug-addicted sister and a mother who could not disconnect from that sister’s dramas. She then went to graduate school at Harvard, where she met the “tawny, rangy, beautiful boy” who became her partner. They moved to Berkeley, where they married and had a son. Yet despite her good fortune, the author could not “outrun my own sadness,” much of which stemmed from witnessing people she loved struggle with addiction and codependence. Diagnosed with both major depressive disorder and dysthymia, she found herself forced to confront the fact that marriage had transformed “hot, young, carefree love” into a prison. As she desperately attempted to understand and embrace her life, K suddenly reappeared, this time on Facebook, and they began a friendship that quickly developed into an affair. Discovering she was pregnant, Aron tried and ultimately failed to reconcile with her husband. She and K then began a relationship in which she soon found herself not only fighting with him about substance abuse problems, but sometimes partaking in and even funding K’s addictions. Interwoven throughout with meditations on desire, caretaking, and the role of early feminists like Carrie Nation in the modern temperance movement, the narrative offers dramatic and compelling insight into Aron’s struggles with codependency as it complicates the relationship among femininity, feminism, and enabling.
A raw and eloquently unflinching memoir.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-57667-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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
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
© 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.
