A masterful literary memoir about caring for those responsible for our trauma.
A poet reflects on her traumatic upbringing.
When Smith, who also works as a clinical social worker and mediator for at-risk families, was 14, she spent the summer of 1973 retaking algebra while her mother went camping with a boyfriend. For “a month and a half,” Smith lived by herself in New Orleans, assuaging her loneliness by riding the streetcar up and down Saint Charles Avenue while standing beside a 29-year-old driver named Gifford. In a visceral passage, Smith describes how, one night, she was raped at knife point by a stranger while attempting to get a cheeseburger. When her mother was “unreachable” and her summer school teacher was unsympathetic, the author confided in Gifford, who cared for her initially but also initiated a confusing sexual relationship that she was too young to comprehend. In the years following these sexual assaults, Smith finally began to understand the role her mother’s neglect had played in her suffering, realizing “that the neglect was the engine that pulled the other parts forward.” During her childhood, though, Smith writes, “It never occurred to me that it should have occurred to my mother to do more to protect me. What you get is what you get.” When the author’s mother suffered from vascular dementia and Smith became her primary caretaker, she realized that she was finally getting what she’d always wanted: her mother’s consistent presence. But at what cost? This stunningly lyrical memoir is a profoundly insightful glimpse into the complex and frightening consequences of parental neglect. As Smith’s voice naturally evolves from alienated to intensely present, the impressively concise narrative alternates between ethereal observations about everything from space to spiders and gut punches of pain, shame, revelation, and redemption.
A masterful literary memoir about caring for those responsible for our trauma.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781469678979
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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