An honest, intense look at a family’s experience with severe disability.
A matter-of-fact, revealing debut memoir by the sister of a severely disabled woman.
Sullivan’s older sister, Mikey, was born prematurely and lost her vision early in life. Initially, her blindness seemed to be her main challenge. At age 2, however, Mikey began to scream, and she seemed to stop feeling pain. Her ability to communicate or understand others became severely limited. She withdrew into her own world and never returned to any sort of normalcy. The term applied by physicians was “brain damaged,” although the author alludes to more modern and precise diagnoses of “intellectual disability” and “autism.” By the time Mikey was 12, her behavior—which included sporadic episodes of violence toward herself and others—necessitated her institutionalization, a decision that both agonized and relieved the family. Her experience at institutions, however, was often substandard and even abusive, and Sullivan pulls no punches in depicting a flawed system and flawed family members who were at the same time caring, doing what they could to help. While Mikey remained the center of the family’s life in many ways, Sullivan presents a robust, multidimensional story that reflects on her own journey beyond her relationship with her sister. Being an adolescent during the height of the 1960s “free love” and drug culture—combined with the emotional issues that emerged from her family life—set the stage for what the author calls a “perfect storm” that would translate into years marked by chaos and addiction. The memoir is often heartbreaking, but Sullivan’s depictions of a complicated and loving family and the unique issues faced by siblings of the severely disabled provide a sense of hope and closure.
An honest, intense look at a family’s experience with severe disability.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-270-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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