Austere yet painfully moving: a refreshing contrast to the spate of whiny memoirs currently crowding bookstore shelves.
Acclaimed novelist Fox (Desperate Characters, reprinted 1999, etc.) describes with astonishing detachment a peripatetic childhood buffeted by the whims of her neurotic parents.
Fox’s alcoholic father, Paul, left her in a Manhattan foundling home days after her birth in 1923 at the insistence of her 19-year-old mother, Elsie, “panic-stricken and ungovernable in her haste to have done with me.” Taken in by a kindly Congregational minister, who raised her in the small town of Balmville, New York, Paula was subjected to occasional alarming excursions with her parents. In a New York hotel, when the little girl observed there was no milk with her dinner, Paul took the tray and dropped it out a window. When she was six, they removed her from the minister’s nurturance; Fox describes this parting as “an amputation.” By the time she was 18, she’d lived in Hollywood, in Kew Gardens, Long Island, with her Spanish grandmother (and several uncles as bizarre as their sister, Elsie), in Cuba, Florida, New Hampshire, and at a boarding school in Montreal. Most of these moves were abruptly decreed by Elsie or Paul (they divorced when Paula was 12) for motives Fox does not attempt to analyze. She delineates her own emotions with delicate restraint, and her prose is as fine as in her fiction. (On a California earthquake: “For moments, the world’s heart had stopped.”) This would be an unbearably sad story if not for paragraphs subtly interspersed throughout that show young Paula discovering the pleasure of words and the power of literature, which “calmed my turbulence, eased my restlessness and shame.” When she was 21, Fox too had an unwanted baby, but the book’s final pages show her reunited with the daughter she gave up for adoption. Without a hint of facile optimism, Fox suggests you can not only survive a traumatic past but learn from it.
Austere yet painfully moving: a refreshing contrast to the spate of whiny memoirs currently crowding bookstore shelves.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6815-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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