An elegant, candid meditation on the fraught journey to self-knowledge.
After divorce and her mother’s death, a writer struggles to redefine herself.
In a memoir notable for its graceful prose, two-time Booker Prize finalist, playwright, and poet Levy (Hot Milk, 2016, etc.) reflects on the new reality of her life after two nearly simultaneous events: the end of her marriage and the loss of her mother. Moving with her daughters into a “large shabby apartment,” she was determined to create “an entirely new composition” for all of their lives. “There are only loving and unloving homes,” she writes. “It is the patriarchal story that has been broken.” The author has much to say about ways that the patriarchal story erases women’s identity. For example, she met several men who refer to women only as men’s girlfriends or wives. At a party, one man never asked her one question about herself, all the while talking about his own books and his ailing wife. “It seemed,” Levy writes, “that what he needed was a devoted, enchanting woman at his side…who understood that he was entirely the subject.” That experience was hardly unusual: “It is so mysterious to want to suppress women,” she muses. “It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them,” she adds. Levy wonders about how desire shaped her mother’s life and how much her own desires shaped her perception of her mother: “If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us.” Mothers receive “mixed messages, written in society’s most poisoned ink.” That poisoned ink infects any woman who dares to break from societal prescriptions. Rebellious women are expected “to be viciously self-hating, crazed with suffering, tearful with remorse.” But the author’s unexpected freedom from her role as wife liberated something “that had been trapped and stifled,” generating renewed energy. Still, she admits, “freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.”
An elegant, candid meditation on the fraught journey to self-knowledge.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-191-2
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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