Showing 1 - 10 of 249 annotations in the genre "Memoir"

Annotated by:
Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Dr. Ross Slotten chose family medicine to serve patients from cradle to grave. But, as he was entering practice, the AIDS virus was entering the community where his practice was situated, and he found himself serving patients much closer to the grave than the cradle. 

In June 1981, a few weeks before I began my internship in family practice at [St. Joseph Hospital in Chicago], the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta had published the first report of a strange lethal infection among a cohort of gay men in Los Angeles. I had no clue then that the disease would soon kill friends, former lovers, colleagues, and patients; devastate tens of millions of people and their families worldwide; and consume my entire professional life and more than half my chronological one. (p.14)

From both the circumstance of time and place he found himself in, and the sense of necessity and compassion that claimed him, Slotten’s professional trajectory unexpectedly shifted away from traditional family medicine towards specializing in AIDS. His interest in AIDS, however, extended to personal considerations, because as a gay man, he was part of the population at risk, and harbored the same anxieties and fears he saw in his patients and throughout his social circles. His patients were principally gay men because of his geographic location in an established gay community and the resulting referral patterns. The book chronicles both his experiences as a physician at Ground Zero taking care of gay men with AIDS, and his experiences as a gay man at risk for AIDS. For Slotten, these experiences were not independent of one another, which makes for rich insights on the complexities of both. 

Slotten spent a lot of time at St. Joseph Hospital because his patients required intense medical support and specialized services. He tells how he and his practice partner pushed for establishing a specialized AIDS unit in the hospital. They bumped up against the usual bureaucratic obstacles, plus a few more concerning issues specific to AIDS patients, but they ultimately prevailed. Slotten “was to spend the next fifteen years there, often heartbroken, occasionally inspired” (p. 109). In contrast, Slotten recounts how some specialists he called for help with particular patients would not avail themselves to AIDS patients. Those occurrences stuck with him: “I couldn’t forgive those other physicians for abandoning me and my patients in the hours of our greatest need” (p. 108). 

A blending of wanderlust, intellectual curiosity, and an urge to understand “the AIDS epidemic as a public health problem, not just a medical condition” (p. 154), motivated Slotten’s pursuit of formal postgraduate education in public health. He supplemented this education with a trip to Namibia, and reports the observations he made there, among them how “an epidemic like AIDS would be unstoppable” (p. 165), given the factors he saw at work then.

With whatever little time he had left for volunteer and advocacy work, Slotten stayed local. He talks about the volunteer-run health clinics where he worked, and the housing facility he helped set up for homeless people with AIDS. He left protesting at the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the annual International AIDS Conference to others while he focused on his patients, his studies, his volunteer work, and his own safety.

The decade of the 2020s is approaching when Slotten writes about the preceding three-and-a-half decades. As he finishes the book he is still caring for people with HIV, but the horrible complications of AIDS are now infrequent since the availability of effective medications. His practice had been reliably stable and predictable for some time, a circumstance he could only dream of when he first started. Alas, that dream had ended by the time the book was released on July 15, 2020, when Covid was surging.

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The Last Strawberry

Swan, Rita

Last Updated: Mar-12-2023

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

In her memoir, The Last Strawberry, Rita Swan describes the illness and death of her sixteen-month-old son, Matthew. As practicing Christian Scientists, Swan and her husband observe their son’s sudden symptoms and unusual behavior but do not visit a pediatrician. Instead, they hire Christian Science “practitioners” whose goal is to effect a cure through prayer. These prayers, however, fail, and Matthew’s condition quickly deteriorates. After days of unsuccessful faith-based treatment, Swan decides, in desperation, to bring her son to a hospital, where he is diagnosed with advanced spinal meningitis. Swan recalls, “We brought our Christian Science books to our comatose child in the intensive care unit. We read, whispered, prayed, and cried over him for hours every day, whether our Church believed it was right or not” (37). Matthew eventually died in the hospital in July 1977.

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Sinkhole

Patterson, Juliet

Last Updated: Jan-18-2023
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

The first few pages of Sinkhole recount the final moments of the author’s father’s life, as the author imagines they occurred.  Slipping away from the bedroom where his wife sleeps, her father writes a note and leaves the house for the last time.  It is nearly zero degrees in Minneapolis as he proceeds to the park where he usually walks his dog. All of this has been methodically planned: “My father chooses to die on the north end of the bridge.  There, the canopy is so dense that, from the street, the structure appears to grow from the hill. In the dim light spreading from the railings, the crown of its arch bestows darkness” (p.4).
 
Immediately following her father’s suicide, author Juliet Patterson is, naturally, overcome.  After the initial shock, she begins to wonder about her father’s motivation.  She realizes she did not know him as well as she had thought.  Theirs is a family that “rarely talked about important things” (p.9).  One of those things is that both her father’s father and mother’s father had also taken their own lives.  She begins to ask questions: “Who were these men?  What led to these deaths in my family?  What did my family’s history of suicide imply?  And what did it mean for my own future?” (p.10) The remainder of Sinkhole tells the story of how the author investigates the death of her grandfathers, a quest that takes her back to her family’s ancestral home in Kansas.   

One day, on an impulse, the author locates her grandmother’s abandoned house.  Like other properties in this part of the country where there were formerly mines, it has fallen into a sinkhole.  She sees the “terrifying alien world of a sinkhole” (p.111) as a metaphor for “a realm that I could not enter,” as she struggles to make sense of her family’s past. Eventually she undergoes a transformation and comes to terms with her loss.  The least she can do to break the cycle is to be honest about her family history with her young son.     

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Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Through ten short chapters, family doctor Susan Boron explains the origin of her neologism, “tokothanatology,” the study of common practices that surround both birth and death, events that “bookend” our existence. Daughter of an obstetrician who pioneered family-centered birth and spouse of a man who worked in palliative care, Boron noticed the tremendous similarities in the gestures, rituals, and obligations of dealing with both the beginning and the end of life. The obligations extend to the loved ones in the sphere of patients in care--a practice, she writes, “from pre-cradle to post-grave.” 

One chapter reviews the rituals emerging from many different cultures and religions; another examines portrayals of birthing and dying in image and word; yet another addresses the impact of sudden and unanticipated outcomes. Ethical and legal dilemmas and the contingencies imposed by time and place are discussed frankly.  

Recognizing the advantages of medical technologies, she is nevertheless skeptical of their utility in every case and includes practical advice for dealing with pain, showing that midwifery techniques could enhance palliation. Throughout, she acknowledges that things have changed, are changing, and will change again. Sources are referenced in footnotes. 

In the end, the repeated message is one we’ve heard many times before, offered in a refreshing way: the importance of empathy and of listening to the patient's wishes in birthing and in dying. 

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Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

When Rachel Aviv, the author of Strangers to Ourselves, was six years old, she simply stopped eating.  She said she got the idea from the Yom Kippur fast.  She was promptly checked into a psychiatric hospital where she became one of the youngest-ever patients to be given the diagnosis of anorexia.  Through associating with older, more seasoned anorexic girls she became a sort of “anorexic-in-training” (p.13). Fortunately, after a few months she snapped out of it, and was discharged.  She never suffered from the same symptoms again.   

As an adult, Aviv began to think about what had happened to her.  The only remnant of her experience was a diary entry from age 8: “I had a diseas called anexexia” (p.231).  Had she even had the disorder, or had the diagnosis been a mistake?  Why had she not gone on to have “an anorexic ‘career’” (ibid.), while one of the girls who had mentored her ultimately died of anorexia-related causes?   In order to answer these questions for herself, Aviv meets with the therapists who treated her more than thirty years ago as well as with the family of her deceased copatient.   

As a result of Aviv’s introspection, she becomes intrigued by people whose psychiatric diagnoses do not fully capture the complexities of their situation.  Strangers to Ourselves presents detailed case histories of several such individuals.  Bapu is an Indian woman whose visions have caused her to be diagnosed with schizophrenia.  Are they delusions, or is she a mystic?  Naomi is a socially disadvantaged black woman who has struggled unsuccessfully to get ahead.  During a manic episode, she jumps into a river with her young twins, one of whom dies. Her claim that “white people are out to get me” (p. 146) is ignored because her doctors insist that “delusions couldn’t on some level make sense” (p. 150). Yet another woman, Laura, bounces from diagnosis to diagnosis, and sleeps fourteen hours a day because of all the medication she is on.  She becomes one of these people who no longer even know if their lack of functioning is “due to their underlying disorder [or] the heavy medications they’d taken for it” (p. 203).      

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Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

In The Unseen Shore: Memories of a Christian Science Childhood, Thomas Simmons narrates the physical, emotional, and spiritual anguish of growing up in, and later leaving, the Christian Science Church. “Have I escaped now? Enormous question—who knows?” writes Simmons, “The obvious answer is Yes, of course I’ve escaped. I now go to doctors; I no longer lie for helpless hours in bed, writhing and trying to pray” (5). Christian Science teaches that illness and pain are illusions of an unreal material world, and that human suffering can be healed through prayer. As the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, wrote in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "Sin, disease, whatever seems real to material sense, is unreal in divine Science" (353). Simmons explains how this theological indoctrination distorted his view of the material world, morality, and the human body: “I remember very clearly several occasions when Sunday school teachers would warn us that medical doctors were not to be trusted because the world they believed in was not our world—it was the world of mortal mind, of disease and distress” (4). Simmons wavers uneasily between apostasy and piety, questioning if he should trust his physical, bodily senses (“mortal mind”) or the numinous promises of Divine care. As he grows up practicing Christian Science, suffering untreated ear infections and other illnesses, he struggles to maintain a posture of devotion while coping with spiritual misgivings.

These “tremors of doubt”, however, haunt Simmons beyond childhood into his adult years (106). Yet two powerful experiences draw him away from Christian Science: the study and composition of poetry and “the love of bodies” (67). In need of a different kind of spiritual direction, Simmons turns to poets whose works celebrate the beauty of the concrete world, realizing that “. . . I want the world, want its physical hardness and qualities of light and sound, the depths of its touch and soul. In the words of poets and teachers I see my own path back into that world” (129). Another key incident occurs following a bout of spiritual renewal when Simmons interviews to become a Christian Science practitioner (a kind of minister who prays for ailing Church members). Stopping to savor the beauty of the California coastline, he hopes the gorgeous expanse will reveal a divine sign affirming his spiritual ambition. He receives an altogether different omen, however, one he considers mockingly lewd, in the form of a naked man exercising on the beach below where he sits: “And yet I could not quite leave. For a few seconds I watched this man run. Far from admiring the precision of his muscles or the stillness of his torso as he moved his legs, I rejected them: they could hold no sway over me, for they were not real. But they remained interesting in their unreality” (156). (Readers might imagine this nude interloper as Vesalius’s anatomical man from De humani corporis fabrica [1555], who stretches and moves with certainty, exhibiting the magnificent brawn and sinews of the human form.) In this moment, Simmons's spiritual optimism almost vanishes, unnerved by the physically real, naked human materiality in which he will ultimately find solace and beauty.

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Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

The author’s beloved Jewish mother is a great storyteller. A favorite tale describes how her grandmother was shot dead while sitting on the family’s Winnipeg porch nursing her baby. An accomplished investigative journalist, author Hoffman assumes it is fiction but decides to investigate. He is astonished to discover that, indeed, his great-grandmother was murdered, although the details deviate slightly from the family tradition. 

Through official records, the Census, and newspaper accounts he pieces together the circumstances of her life and death and the frustrated search for her killer. In the process, he learns a great deal about his ancestors and the world of Jewish immigrants in early twentieth-century Canada. Eager to share his findings, he is confronted by his mother’s decline into dementia and the poignant difficulties of grasping and reshaping memories, both collective and individual. 

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Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

Zauner, Michelle

Last Updated: Jun-23-2022
Annotated by:
Schilling, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

While Michelle Zauner’s remarkable memoir is an expression of her profound grief after her mother died, her story simultaneously reflects on her complicated relationship with the woman she called Umma and with her own Korean-American identity. The H Mart of the title, an Asian grocery chain, provided the ingredients for the dishes that suffused their relationship, her identity, and her grief. Food and memory animate the memoir itself.  

Zauner was 25 when her mother was diagnosed with an aggressive late-stage, mid-life cancer. Also the only daughter of a white American father, Zauner was a rebellious child, resentful of Umma’s version of tough love. Growing up the lone Asian student in her Oregon community, she felt both othered at school and an outsider among her Seoul relatives. Just as she was beginning to appreciate her Korean heritage and understand her mother’s love, she learned about Umma’s diagnosis.  

The first half of the memoir exuberantly brings to life scenes from Zauner’s childhood and her brief post-college years in New York City, interrupted by her dedicated caregiving. Attempting to save her mother, Zauner at times overwhelmed her with her native foods. “I would radiate joy and positivity,” Zauner pledged. “I would learn to cook for her—all the things she loved to eat, and I would single-handedly keep her from withering away” (69). Her optimistic culinary efforts produce a poetry of exacting descriptions of the flavors and textures and preparation of those foods. It’s grimly ironic that the chemotherapy her mother endured wiped out her ability to taste or digest Zauner’s loving offerings of health.  

The second half turns from living with Umma to living without her. Wishing to sustain her bond with her mother as Zauner grieved, she continued to prepare her Korean family’s recipes. Walking down H Mart’s redolent isles generated “waves” of sorrow that mark the enduring ebb and flow of her grief. Unsuccessful with conventional therapy, she found cooking a preferable form of self-care. “Every dish I cooked exhumed a memory. Every scent and taste brought me back for a moment to an unravaged home. Knife-cut noodles in chicken broth took me back to lunch at Myeongdong Gyoja . . . The kalguksu so dense from the rich beef stock and starchy noodles it was nearly gelatinous. My mother ordering more and more refills of their famously garlic-heavy kimchi” (212-213). As if miraculously, a few years after Umma died, Zauner’s itinerant music career ignited. The band she has fronted, Japanese Breakfast, recorded an album, Psychopop (with a song she wrote about her mother, “In Heaven”). Then they toured the U.S. and South Korea. Although her mother was skeptical about a musical career, Zauner imagined that Umma would be “glad that I had finally found a place where I belonged” (233). 

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Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

After 65 years of marriage, two life-partners face the prospect of final separation, as one of them develops multiple myeloma. This is the crisis that led Irvin Yalom, eminent psychiatrist, novelist, and pioneer of existential psychotherapy, and his wife Marilyn, acclaimed feminist author and historian, to collaborate in writing the story of their journey through Marilyn’s final months of life. In the resulting book, Irvin and Marilyn write alternating chapters until Marilyn becomes unable to write. After her death, Irvin continues with the story of his bereavement.  

Marilyn’s chapters include reflections on love and illness, ranging from Emily Dickinson and Henry James to Paul the Apostle. She frequently expresses her gratitude: “I can still talk, read, and answer my emails. I am surrounded by loving people in a comfortable and attractive home.” (p. 20) Most of all, she is thankful for her husband, “the most loving of caretakers.” (p. 15) Yet, as her disease progresses, she comes “to the understanding that I would never be the same again—that I would pass through days of unspeakable misery while my body would decline and weaken.” (p. 76) She decides to pursue the option of physician-assisted suicide, which is legal in California, when her suffering becomes overwhelming.  

In his chapters, Irvin resists this decision, maintaining hope for additional “good” life, despite all evidence to the contrary. Near the end, Marilyn’s pain and other symptoms become so severe that she cries out, “It’s time, Irv. It’s time. No more, please. No more.” (p. 139) Her physician arrives, confirms her intention, and surrounded by her whole family, Marilyn sucks the liquid through a straw and quietly passes away.

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Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

The Urge: Our History of Addiction, by Carl Erik Fisher, a psychiatrist, is really two books in one.  It is a comprehensive history of addiction from ancient times to the present day.  It is also a memoir of the author’s own struggle with addiction and an attempt “to understand how I went from being a newly minted physician in a psychiatry residency program…to a psychiatric patient” (p.ix).  

Fisher has grown up with two alcoholic parents.  Even as his mother’s drinking “suppresses her blood counts and causes her to miss the chemo sessions I have worked so hard to arrange” (p. 294), she does not stop.  Fisher’s own first drink, in high school, is a revelation.  He blows his interview for his first-choice college when he shows up late and hung over. His intelligence enables him to get by, but eventually the problem catches up with him as he begins to use Adderall and marijuana to counteract the effects of alcohol.  After sleeping through and missing his residency orientation, he is under scrutiny.  Finally, he has a drug-induced manic episode that results in his being tasered by the police, and he is forced into treatment.    

In the historical sequences of the book, we discover that one of the oldest known examples of addiction is found as far back as the Rig Veda (1000 BC).  From there we move through time, learning how Native American populations were devastated by alcohol, how Alcoholics Anonymous achieved prominence, and about the multiple challenges that persist to the present day. 

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