A heart-wrenching cancer memoir overly focused on medical details.
A memoir about supporting a spouse through terminal cancer.
In this deeply personal book, Stewart chronicles his journey through his wife Lynn’s cancer diagnosis, treatment, and death. In 2014, after experiencing a slew of gastrointestinal issues and unexplained back pain, 68-year-old Lynn received MRI results indicating masses in the spine and lung. Stewart revisits memories spanning their unconventional partnership before returning to the present moment, in which the couple realizes their time together is limited. After a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis, Lynn underwent radiation and entered a clinical trial at Sloan Kettering for experimental drugs. After a brief period of stabilization, Lynn’s excruciating back pain returned, and doctors discovered that her vertebrae were collapsing. Meanwhile, Stewart suffered from caregiver burnout and experienced both burn and bicycle accidents. During the pandemic, Lynn contracted pneumonia and her condition worsened. Eventually, she decided to stop cancer treatment and begin hospice care. “We’ve lost almost everything else that we loved to do, but we still have each other,” Stewart wrote in a message board post; Lynn took her final breath the next day. Stewart rode waves of deep grief following Lynn’s death, finding solace in Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. While mourning, Stewart embarked on a romantic relationship; the new couple hosted a retrospective show of Lynn’s artwork before closing her studio. The book concludes with Stewart’s letter to his late wife and the burial of her ashes. The author seamlessly weaves real-life scenes, emails, internet posts, and photographs from his life with Lynn into a varied and intimate narrative. He beautifully describes the couple’s unique relationship, highlighting details like Lynn’s rule that “every kiss had to be a real kiss: Your lips had to be alive.” The author bravely shares his darkest thoughts, such as, “maybe it would be better if Lynn died sooner rather than later” and “I really missed being able to have sex the way we used to.” However, the sections about the deaths of other family and friends feel like unnecessary detours, and the extensive recounting of medical appointments, procedures, and bureaucratic snags also detracts from the story’s emotional impact.
A heart-wrenching cancer memoir overly focused on medical details.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9798992264913
Page Count: 310
Publisher: West End Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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