A thoughtful memoir revealing that mother-daughter relationships don’t necessarily get easier with age.
Sheridan discusses becoming the caretaker of her emotionally distant expat mother in this debut memoir.
In 1977, the author dropped out of college and took a job as an aide at the Driftwood Convalescent Hospital in Santa Cruz, California. “None of my nine patients were intact, fully functional human beings,” she recalls. “Every morning, I woke, fed, toileted, washed and dressed my charges, helping those not bedridden into their wheelchairs.” When she told her mother Amy about the job, Amy’s only response was to make Sheridan promise never to put her in a place like that when she was old. By that point, the author already had a slightly strained relationship with her mother. Due to her father’s work in agricultural modernization, Sheridan and her four brothers grew up moving between California, Libya, England, and New Mexico. When she was 16, her mother left the family during a vacation to the Italian Riviera, after which Amy remained in Italy with her new boyfriend. From then on, the author felt like an afterthought in Amy’s life, a rarely considered artifact of a time the older woman had left behind. Later, when the octogenarian Amy decided to move back to California to take up residence in a retirement community, the twice-divorced Sheridan, now in her 50s, was forced to step into the role of daughter in a way she’d never known before. The situation became more strained when Amy broke her pelvis in a fall and the author, wanting to keep her long-ago promise to her mother, invited the ailing woman to move into the little bungalow beside her house. After nearly a lifetime spent residing on separate continents, Sheridan finally had her mother close enough to begin to understand what made her tick. With this time-hopping memoir, the author explores the contradictions of a relationship she never fully grasped until its final chapter.
Sheridan’s fluid prose captures her relationship with her mother in all its humor and horror. Here, she tries to ignore the baby monitor she’s set up in her mother’s bungalow during the woman’s slide into dementia: “Returning to bed, I lay in the dark, still rigid with tension. My mother singing lustily away in the monitor…Like a bad daughter—or was I finally now the mean, uncaring mother?—I switched off the demonic device and assumed the fetal position. I’d deal with everything in the morning.” Amy is, in the author’s telling, an enigmatic woman of vexing tics and vast pretensions. (When Sheridan visited her in Italy, Amy charged her daughter for the groceries she consumed and didn’t like them being overheard speaking English, lest anyone realize they were American.) Amy’s villainy seems mostly unintentional, though it is primarily directed at her lone daughter, whose quest to win her approval forms the unstable basis of their relationship. Presented in quick chapters with occasional flashbacks to moments from Sheridan’s younger years, and illustrated with several photographs, the account moves quickly. The memoir offers many moments that anyone with a difficult or aging parent will surely relate to.
A thoughtful memoir revealing that mother-daughter relationships don’t necessarily get easier with age.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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