An emotionally saturated memoir: dynamic, moving, and colorful.
In her poignant debut memoir, entrepreneur and social activist Patterson unfolds her familial lineage of women who wrestled with marriage either through divorces or in their rejection of the institution altogether, often opting for “partnership without laws.”
As a slight-framed African-American girl who attended mostly white private schools, the author’s own coming-of-age in 1970s Manhattan was fraught with challenges. The virtual opposite of her turbulent sister Ramona, Patterson searched for her identity while navigating the 1980s world of music and style at nightclubs and in college, continually encouraged by her father to be courageous and resilient and to embrace her blackness. Adulthood forced her to choose between a career in publishing and a temporary gig at a strip club. “As sexist as stripping for money sounds,” she writes, “I was dictating my own worth.” Yet her greatest trial as a woman and a mother would arrive with the birth of her third child, Penelope, and the ensuing challenge of “living with a reality that has turned me upside down.” As a toddler, Penelope experienced a radical, unconventional “declaration of self,” telling her mother, “I am a boy.” Patterson openly shares details from those early years, which were fraught with so many strong emotions, including guilt, confusion, and fear that Penelope would be robbed of the “uncomplicated freedom” of so-called normalcy. After months of soul-searching and discussions with her extended family, who were unconditionally accepting, the author came to terms with the reality that Penelope would now be known as Penel, her son. These revelations and developments did not occur, however, without bearing the brunt of societal intolerance, cruelty, and questioning of Patterson as a mother. “The world is unkind to people it doesn’t understand—to those who don’t live by its rules,” she writes. The author’s journey of familial love and fearless motherhood will particularly resonate with parents of transgender children and anyone who has struggled to be loved or accepted.
An emotionally saturated memoir: dynamic, moving, and colorful.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-17901-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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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