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WONDERING WHO YOU ARE

Name: WONDERING WHO YOU ARE
Author: Sonya Lea
ISBN: 978-1-941040-07-2

A MEMOIR

by Sonya Lea ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 3, 2015

A forthright memoir that narrates an engrossing journey of self-discovery and fierce devotion.

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A wife’s tale of loss and recovery.

In June 2000, diagnosed with an extremely rare appendix cancer, Lea’s husband chose to undergo an experimental surgery to excise cancerous growths filling his abdomen, followed by several days of hot chemotherapy. Post-surgery complications resulted in his suffering an “anoxic insult,” loss of oxygen to the brain. After the siege to his body, he emerged weak, disoriented, and unable to remember anything. In her candid, unsentimental debut memoir, Lea tells the story of two survivors—her husband, Richard, and herself—as they have confronted changes in their identity, relationship, and family as a result of his trauma. She interweaves a chronicle of Richard’s medical challenges with her account of a 23-year marriage that was often infused with anger: Richard’s erupted in violent attacks on their young son, Lea’s in rebellion against responsibilities as a wife and mother. Yearning to be wild, she turned to drink, often blacking out, sometimes for minutes; “other times, most of a night would go by and I wouldn’t know what had happened.” She was an alcoholic for years before she finally went to Alcoholics Anonymous; by the time of Richard’s operation, the marriage had improved. As Richard’s caregiver, though, anger surfaced again: she admits that she does not like “leaving the role of his lover to take on what feels like becoming his nurse, teacher, and mother.” But she is “determined to become the fiercest, most virtuous caregiver anyone has ever seen.” Their daughter accused Lea of controlling Richard’s story by publishing her version, and sometimes her assertions are troubling: Lea writes, for example, that “Richard isn’t experiencing grief for a lost self” because he is “helpless to find that former being.” But readers will get little sense of what Richard truly feels, and grief seems a distinct possibility.

A forthright memoir that narrates an engrossing journey of self-discovery and fierce devotion.

Pub Date: July 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-941040-07-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Tin House

Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- PROFILES
Sonya Lea

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.