A memoir filled with advice and support for anyone else going through similar circumstances.
An essay gone viral leads to this memoir about deep loss and navigating profound grief.
In March 2017, on the eve of her death from ovarian cancer, bestselling author Amy Krouse Rosenthal published a piece in the “Modern Love” section of the New York Times. Titled “You May Want To Marry My Husband,” it read like an expanded dating-site post extolling the virtues of the man who would soon become a widower. It generated millions of views and plenty of responses, including a few marriage proposals, but also numerous messages of support from well-wishers who had experienced similar tragedies. This book contains the entire original column as well as a follow-up column, written by the author, titled “My Wife Said You May Want To Marry Me,” excerpts from many of the responses he received, and passages from notes and letters he and his wife exchanged during what seemed like an idyllic marriage. “If he sounds like a prince and our relationship seems like a fairy tale, it’s not too far off,” she wrote in her essay, and this memoir corroborates that account. Yet her death wasn’t the turn a fairy tale is supposed to take, and the author’s coming to terms with it is easily the most moving and useful part of the book. As he writes, he discovered that “grief as a process is unique to everyone, and there is no right or wrong way to flow through it.” He takes us through that process and shows us what kinds of support were particularly helpful. He doesn’t have any desire to let go, but he found that he was able to move on, even to fall in love again, perhaps partly because his late wife encouraged him to do so.
A memoir filled with advice and support for anyone else going through similar circumstances.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-294059-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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