Affecting stories told effectively, with all the complications involved in searching for truth.
Stories matter, memory is tricky, the past permeates us: these and other insights appear continually in a collection of interwoven personal essays.
There is no indication that these pieces have been published elsewhere, though an internet search turns up some previous online appearances. Proctor (Creative Writing/Fairleigh Dickinson Univ.; Do You Hear What I Hear? Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My Father, 2005, etc.), a translator, author, and editor, tells a number of stories, some of which resemble one another in certain ways, others that deal with adolescent foolishness, parents, motherhood, religion, psychotherapy, writing and translating, death and dying. Throughout, the author remains candid about herself—sometimes brutally, painfully so. She discusses her early difficulties in school; her relationships with men, including marriage(s); her times living abroad, where she learned Italian—she’s now a translator; her admiration for various writers, including Muriel Spark; her children’s sometimes-evocative conversations; and her visits with an astrologer. Proctor’s essays sometimes allude to one another in ways—sometimes subtle, sometimes patent—and she is very fond of endings and exits that evoke high emotion in a few words. Her text, as well, is full of pithy, even aphoristic phrases and sentences—e.g., “the perversions of memory”; “It is tricky to talk about shame.” In several pieces, the author employs a technique resembling a musical motif: in one essay, she revisits Waiting for Godot several times; in another, an astrologer’s observations pop up now and then. Among the most wrenching of her stories, which appears throughout the collection, is that of her mother’s losing battle with cancer. The final essay, “The Waiting Earth,” which takes readers to a cemetery, features a final sentence that will create a tear in even the driest of eyes.
Affecting stories told effectively, with all the complications involved in searching for truth.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-936787-61-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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