A quirky book that unfortunately does not help further the dialogue about the difficult experience of coming out.
A series of essays that document the difficult task of self-acceptance.
After years without a relationship or a stable sexual preference, former BuzzFeed editor Heaney (Dear Emma, 2016, etc.) decided to take matters into her own hands and go at the same speed as her feelings—frantically, somewhat aimlessly—toward the uncertain question that loomed over her head: am I gay? It started with a feeling of displacement. “This world,” she writes, “in its forceful femaleness, was something that greatly appealed to me. I did not feel a part of it, but I found myself longing to be.” Then the author discovered The L Word, an all-female TV show centered around the lives of gay women. Quickly, Heaney’s desire increased. While in graduate school at the University of Minnesota, Heaney had her first girl crush, which ultimately opened the doors of her desire and allowed her to feel something real for another woman. The author organizes the book in essays, or extended moments, punctuated by brief memos in which she describes various interactions with women throughout her life. Though Heaney provides a singular look at the experience of coming out, the essays often feel predictable. For example: “I was fascinated by lesbians being lesbians and talking about lesbians, to a degree that didn’t seem fitting for someone who now identified as one herself.” Sometimes, Heaney seems to be living according to a guidebook of expectations of what lesbians are supposed to feel, act like, and talk about, based on a society that more often than not limits their liberties. Furthermore, the author’s voice, though relatable, is too frequently self-congratulatory. She discusses her previous memoir, Never Have I Ever (2014), so many times that readers might lose interest in wanting to read it.
A quirky book that unfortunately does not help further the dialogue about the difficult experience of coming out.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-18095-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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
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