Publisher's Weekly Review
The answer to the question posed by such a title would seem, inevitably, to be "no," but Gordon qualifies her frequent tears as "the manifestation of a particularly satisfying kind of lyrical sadness." This is her second venture into memoir, following the well-reviewed Mockingbird Years, an account of her institutionalization as a late teenager and subsequent therapy. This book covers her earlier, 1950s childhood as the daughter of a miserly and often hectoring Jewish economics professor at Williams College, whom she claims to have hated, and his eventually alcoholic Presbyterian schoolteacher wife. Though bright (readers are told frequently), Gordon felt like a "misfit"; an overweight, underachieving faculty brat; a "social pariah"; a "blob." By sixth grade, she was failing school and, like her classmates, fascinated by sex. A crush on her voice coach led her to try to implicate his wife in an affair with the soccer coach, but the lie was easily discovered, leaving her humiliated and eager to move with her parents from the Berkshires to Manhattan for a fresh start. The book, about childhood friends and teachers, too, analyzes Gordon's parents throughout. Early on, Gordon comments, "There's nothing more tiresome than a grown daughter's brief against her parents." Indeed. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The prequel to Gordon's Mockingbird Years (2000), which told of her life in and out of therapy. While that book included some of her childhood memories, this one deals exclusively with her preteen years growing up in Williamstown, Mass., home of Williams College, where her father was a professor of economics. Her father does not fare well in these pages, nor does her mother; her older sister is almost entirely absent, and her younger brother, Andy, is fondly remembered only in their very early years together. This is the author's story, one of a child out of sync with the world around her. Her best times seem to have been traipsing freely about the Williams campus, exploring it and the surrounding countryside. She was, she insists, happy as a child, but the memories she conjures up seldom bear out this claim. The picture that emerges is of an introspective, physically unattractive child, often alone, failing in school, and for years the victim of other children's teasing. She says that she cried a good deal as a child, but that her tears were "the manifestation of a particularly satisfying kind of lyrical sadness." To comfort herself, she engaged in a kind of internal writing, not putting her words on paper, but mumbling aloud descriptions of herself and her own behavior and her observations about those around her. It is difficult to know what to make of Gordon's memoir as a document of a childhood; adult sensibilities can't help but inform the work. Her writing, however, is skillful, and her account is replete with lucid scenes, capturing moments of pleasure and pain, awkwardness and confusion, torment and temporary triumph. A wistful coming-of-age tale. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Gordon is a mordantly witty writer with a gift for slam-dunk metaphors. She is also stubbornly confessional and obsessed with minutiae. Gordon's first memoir, Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy0 (2000), documented her psychiatric institutionalization as a teenager. Now she circles back to her 1950s childhood as a chubby and hard-to-educate "faculty brat" in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where her father was a professor of economics on his way to becoming a presidential advisor, and her flinty, ironic, and multitalented mother was headed for alcoholism. It makes sense that she feels like a "visiting anthropologist," given her preternatural observational skills and sense of outsiderness. Gordon's portraits of her parents are acid-etched, her ability to convey her child's sensibility impressive, and her interpretation of collegiate society and her school days scathing. Frustratingly, her barbed reminiscences turn smothering and eventually ring false. Hopefully this cathartic work will allow Gordon to move on and turn her considerable talents loose on a larger world. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist
Library Journal Review
A celebrated essayist shares ``moments of radiant apprehension'' during an otherwise shaded childhood as she contemplates the nature of -happiness. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
