Expertly captures grace within depravity.
In her provocative debut, Febos chronicles her descent into drug and sex addiction and her harrowing escape from both.
Already a heroin addict in 1999, the author moved to New York to attend college at the New School. A chance encounter with a neighbor led her to find work in an upscale S&M house. For the next four years she was a professional dominatrix. Febos pulls no punches as she describes in minute, and at times horrific, detail her working life fulfilling the sexual fantasies of men who need to be humiliated (or to humiliate), where the tools of her trade included “latex enema, colon tube, Bardex, clamps, catheter, piercing needles, leather cuffs.” At first she viewed the work as just a well-paying gig, but she began to realize that it also fulfilled personal needs that had seemingly always been there—a need to seduce, to be desired, to control but also, paradoxically, to be controlled. She was seduced by “the romance of misbehavior” and “the exhilaration of secrecy.” She considered herself smart and clever enough to be both “normal”—the brilliant student with a bright writing future—and a drug-addled sex worker who increasingly crossed self-imposed barriers of what she would not do for money and attention. Eventually her dual life began to destroy her, and her intellectual arrogance gave way to the realization that “my compulsions were simply stronger than my will.” Her drug life was reduced to locking herself in her room with “a glass of water, a bag of puke, and a coffee can full of pee in the closet.” With much suffering and plenty of help, she ended her drug addiction, but the sex addiction remained. Not until she learned to accept the essential truth about herself was she able to escape the demons that haunted her and the depression they nurtured. In lesser hands this could be a maudlin, salacious tale, but Febos’s electrifying prose and unremitting honesty continually challenge the reader.
Expertly captures grace within depravity.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-56102-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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
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
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