A wrenchingly lyrical memoir of family and tragedy.
A novelist and poet tells the fragmented story of how she came to terms with the suicides of her father and then her mother.
The memoir opens with an 18-year-old McBride (The Fire Opal, 2012, etc.) in a psychiatric hospital struggling to cope with the deaths of her parents. Moving back and forth through time, the author examines her past in an attempt to understand it and the parents who shaped it. The daughter of two Irish Catholic parents who “lov[ed] and miss[ed]” an Ireland they had never seen, McBride bore witness to the traumatic disintegration of her family over time. The problems began when her father, Vincent, did not get the well-paying job he and McBride’s mother, Barbara, expected. The family was forced to move out of the big house in Yonkers that her parents had bought in expectation of Vincent’s success. They traveled to Santa Fe along with McBride’s senile, often cruel grandmother Nanny. Meanwhile, Vincent continued to struggle professionally. Unable to advance in his career, he took a second job as a bartender and began to drift into alcoholism while Barbara became increasingly unstable and Nanny more demented and embittered. After Nanny’s death, the situation between McBride’s parents only worsened, with Barbara threatening suicide and becoming more violent toward her husband, who eventually shot himself. Five months later, Barbara shot herself as well and “died without a face.” Haunted both literally and figuratively by her parents’ ghosts, McBride eventually sold everything she owned and moved to Ireland, where she was determined to live and make peace with her parents and her past. Harrowing yet beautiful, the book is not only an exploration of the interplay between memory and imagination. It is also an eloquent meditation on the painful burdens of the past that parents bequeath their children.
A wrenchingly lyrical memoir of family and tragedy.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941040-43-0
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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