Memoirist Abbott reflects on a lifetime of love, drawing its outlines as a child would draw a picture in the sand, stopping for every delectable contour on her map of love. Arguing that “novels seize the real, just as memoirs seize fantasy,” Abbott (The Bookmaker’s Daughter, 1991) dwells at length on the books and movies that helped to form her own evolving sense of romance. Her promiscuously ardent appetite for both film and the written word constituted a romantic longing that eventually came to know no bounds, led her into awkward adolescent dalliances, and finally, in 1957, to a passionate year abroad in Paris that would change her life forever. After she resettled in New York, Abbott’s professional life flourished, while her marital life withered; she was tortured by the fear that love, which she had imagined as a great liberation, might really be not much more than “wishing to be the thing imagined.” She was an idealist in matters of the heart, accused of being too intense, forever searching for a more fulfilling relationship. She commuted, cooked, tended her children, and paid the bills, fighting and finally fleeing the conventions of marriage. Her confession celebrates her “gorgeous mythologies” of love and lovemaking while admitting that bargains with the real world of work and children must be made. Now in her 70s and reunited with her husband, with her children on their own and the turbulent years of her young adulthood very long gone indeed, Abbott nevertheless observes that she still dreams of Tristan and Isolde, and of one day locating their graves in romantic tribute. A candid reverie on love, and the memoir of a woman who is struggling against the odds to reconcile the conflicting demands of fantasy and fact.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-395-67369-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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