A distinguished memoir: one of those rare insights into motherhood that describes the magical and the mundane with equal...
From Australian novelist Johnson (Hungry Ghosts, p. 128, etc.), a beautifully written and remarkably wise look at the realities of becoming a mother, as well as at the unexpected physical consequences of giving birth.
Johnson transforms what could be a conventional motherhood-survival story into an often transcendent tale of how she “became a better woman” as her life was enriched and deepened by the experience of giving birth. Until she was 35, Johnson had lived as she pleased, writing and living where she liked. But as she drove through France, her “arms began to feel empty.” Though she had regarded children with ambivalence, she suddenly “wanted to feel the weight of life . . . to enmesh [her]self in the fabric of living.” Back in London, she married fellow Australian Les and in 1995, now 38 and pregnant, flew back to Australia, where their first son, Caspar, was born. Johnson vividly describes not only her fears about bearing a healthy baby as she raced to finish Hungry Ghosts, but also those extraordinary moments of maternal exultation: seeing in a face an entire universe; the poignant awareness of the “sweet, short time [when] the past and future do not exist . . . and not one single promise has gone unfulfilled”; and the conviction that nothing in her life, not even writing a novel, has made her feel as competent. Other typical but less exalted moments include trying to breastfeed, get enough sleep, write, and deal with her lack of money. She also developed a fistula in the rectal-vaginal area, which, after her second son was born 16 months later in a botched delivery, required surgery and a temporary colostomy so that her body could heal.
A distinguished memoir: one of those rare insights into motherhood that describes the magical and the mundane with equal insight and honesty.Pub Date: April 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-7434-3296-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
