Join 350,000+ subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of
The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
Also of interest...in overcoming long odds
Gypsy Boy by Mikey Walsh; Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman; Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson; At Last by Edward St. Aubyn
Born into a family of bare-knuckle Gypsy boxers, memoirist Mikey Walsh was “taking punches from his dad by the time most kids were in preschool,” said Kate Tuttle in The Boston Globe. A true outcast, Walsh was not just a Gypsy but also came to discover that he was gay. Despite considerable struggles, Walsh eventually found acceptance. Memoirs written under a pseudonym often “reek of fraudulence,” but Gypsy Boy “feels, in all its cocky, awkward affection and anguish, like the real deal.”
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Deborah Feldman’s memoir reads like “one of the darker Grimms’ fairy tales,” said Marion Winik in Newsday. Abandoned by her mother, Feldman grew up under a series of “twisted caregivers” as a free-spirited girl chafing under the rules and customs of a Hasidic Jewish sect in Brooklyn. After an arranged marriage that led to more misery, Feldman ultimately liberated herself, starting a new life and promising her son she’d never again stay silent. “Let’s hope she never does.”
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Sign up for our Culture & Life newsletter
Your weekly digest of stories about entertainment and leisure, delivered every Friday
by Jeanette Winterson (Grove, $25)
It’s unlikely that novelist Jeanette Winterson could imagine a villain as cruel as her adoptive mother, said Sarah Barmak in the Toronto Globe and Mail. When she wasn’t locking Winterson in a coal bin, this gun-toting terror was reminding the girl that “the devil led us to the wrong crib.” Though Winterson’s first memoir is sometimes self-pitying, it offers a touching story about how books saved her life, how literature can be a child’s lifeline.
At Last
by Edward St. Aubyn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25)
With At Last, Edward St. Aubyn brings “a remarkable cycle of novels” to a close, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. In previous books, the aristocratic author’s stand-in, Patrick Melrose, overcame sexual abuse by his father and heroin addiction. Here, the character finds a measure of peace. For those new to the series: Imagine “one of Evelyn Waugh’s wicked satires mashed up with a searing memoir of abuse, and injected with Proustian meditations on the workings of memory and time.”
