Though lively and richly detailed, Valenti’s work lacks the self-awareness essential to a memoir worth pondering.
A new memoir from the Guardian columnist and “professional feminist.”
“Who would I be if I didn’t live in a world that hated women?” asks Valenti (Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness, 2012, etc.). As she skips around through her memories, the author does include some examples of unpleasant encounters with men: the guys who whistled at her or rubbed up against her in subways as she was growing up in Queens, New York; the college boyfriend who indulged in a nasty species of revenge after they broke up; the high school teacher who said that he would give her an A if she gave him a hug; the married friend who expressed sexual interest in her. On the other hand, Valenti, who admits that she overindulged in alcohol and cocaine for years, acting on the theory that “cocaine let me drink as much as I wanted without passing out or embarrassing myself,” seems to be at least partially responsible for some of her own suffering. When she notes, “I cheated on almost all my boyfriends with regularity and without remorse,” it’s difficult to give her much sympathy when she complains about a boyfriend who was chronically half an hour late for everything. The sections of the memoir that deal with the premature birth of her daughter, her difficulty bonding with the infant, and her daughter’s selective mutism are touching, but they are not concerned with pain caused by the hatred of men; Valenti has not a word of complaint about her “lovely” feminist husband. The author ends the book with pages of insulting or demeaning emails and Facebook posts directed toward her, an odd choice since it gives the last word to her critics. Ultimately, the scattered narrative includes some jaw-dropping scenes but fails to live up to its provocative premise.
Though lively and richly detailed, Valenti’s work lacks the self-awareness essential to a memoir worth pondering.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-243508-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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