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The Boys of My Youth
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Hello! I looked into my brain and found a book. Here it is. Inside you will find: the smell of honeysuckle; heartbreak; a French-kissing rabbit; a haunted house; death; a vagina singing sad, old songs; young geraniums in an ancient castle; birth; a dog who appears in dreams as a spiritual guide; divorce; electromagnetic energy fields; emotional horniness; the ghost of a sea captain; and more. I hope you enjoy these little weirds. Love, Jenny Slate.
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Even a collection of essays has to hook the reader
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Lit follows Mary Karr's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness - and her astonishing resurrection. Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting poet produces a son they adore. But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in "The Mental Marriott" awakens her to the possibility of joy, and leads her to an unlikely faith.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Compelling.
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When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: Dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time.
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3 out of 5 stars
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3.97 stars
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 42
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All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks - and answers.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Must Own for all Students and Fans of CNF
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With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction - both her own and others' - and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Waaaaaaayyyyyy Too Long
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 105
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Structured around the 40 questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman's essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear - both here and back home.
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5 out of 5 stars
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educate yourself
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Publisher's Summary
Rarely does the debut of a new writer garner such attention and acclaim. The excitement began the moment "The Fourth State of Matter", one of the 14 extraordinary personal narratives in this book, appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. It increased when the author received a prestigious Whiting Foundation Award in November 1997, and it continued as the hardcover edition of The Boys of My Youth sold out its first printing even before publication. The author writes with perfect pitch as she takes us through one woman's life - from childhood to marriage and beyond - and memorably captures the collision of youthful longing and the hard intransigencies of time and fate.
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Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Michael
- 12-15-18
Meh
Ultimately this audiobook ends up being meh with a meh performance and meh story. Excellent level of craft put to meh and subdued purposes.