Reflective and tender writing on finding new meanings and a different life after heartbreaking loss.
A memoir of finding a new way forward following significant misfortune.
In The Hot Young Widow’s Club (2019), her recent TED book, McInerny (It’s Okay to Laugh: (Crying Is Cool Too), 2017, etc.) told the story of her life after she suffered three tragedies in one year: a miscarriage and the deaths of her father and her husband, Aaron. Her latest book is a continuation of sorts, chronicling her relationship with Aaron and her new relationship with Matthew, a divorced man with two children. With both witty humor and profundity, the author addresses the harsh reality of death and the life-changing effects of her grief, especially that critical first year when every day was an anniversary of some sort that needed to be lived through as best she could. Her story is also a celebration of life, sexual desire, and learning to love what is right in front of you, regardless of how others feel or react to the situation. The author, who hosts the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking, openly shares her fears about potentially losing Aaron’s extended family as members of her own, the difficulties and triumphs of blending Matthew’s family with hers, and the gratefulness she has felt about having two different relationships with two extraordinary men. Additionally, within this tragic love story are minor themes of feminism, sexism, and religion. McInerny’s best friends and their unwavering support through all the ups and downs are also significant factors in this perceptive tale. The author’s love for both Aaron and Matthew is consistently apparent but, refreshingly, never maudlin. McInerny delivers a highly emotional—but not overly somber—story that will appeal to anyone who has suffered a significant loss and is seeking a path toward life’s next chapter.
Reflective and tender writing on finding new meanings and a different life after heartbreaking loss.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-279240-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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