PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIf you’re in it for the stargazing, you’ll be rewarded with plenty — but that’s not what lingers most after the telling ... As actors, Dern and Ladd have spent decades peeling back layers to reveal their characters’ fears and desires. It’s when they turn that focus to each other and themselves that something remarkable emerges ... At first it seems a bit repetitive ... They tell funny anecdotes ... Then the tone shifts. On a later walk, Dern admits that she often resented being left with her grandmother while Ladd was away for work. A suddenly emotional Ladd says she sometimes felt unfairly burdened with the responsibility of supporting not only her daughter but her mother ... The book is at its most memorable and affecting when they work up the courage to excavate heavy, sharp-edged emotional artifacts ... They yell, grow quiet, accuse and forgive, allowing us to witness their relationship evolving, walk by walk. Ladd’s health improves. Dern draws even closer to her mother. For them, the experiment proves successful. For readers, it may depend on what we come for. I recommend going into Honey, Baby, Mine curious about the origin stories, separate and intertwined, of two prolific artists who pushed through private challenges — are pushing through still — while forging lives in the public eye.
Rob Delaney
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewMemoirs by grieving parents obviously have some similarities; what makes the best of them unique is each writer’s voice. I was reminded, up to a point, of Jayson Greene’s magnificent memoir about his young daughter’s death, Once More We Saw Stars. But A Heart That Works is a book about grief as only Delaney could write it. Indeed, it is the work of a more mature writer than the one who published his first memoir in 2013 ... Though it will inevitably be described by some as \'raw,\' I’d like to pre-emptively disagree. True, the book is lit up with flashes of red-hot fury and despair ... There’s nothing undercooked or unpolished, however, about the captivating spiral narrative Delaney crafts, doling out memories and digressions with precision and modulating the emotional volume with impressive control. He touches on his son’s death, spins away into a poignant contemplation of the invisible burdens of strangers or a profanity-laced swipe at the American health care system, then comes back to his central loss, again and again. Will you cry? Yes, unless you have no soul. You’ll also have space to catch your breath ... And you will laugh, because this book is often miraculously funny...His absurdist’s touch makes otherwise mundane sentences bubble with playfulness ... Even some of the darkest moments are slashed through with light ... That’s another miracle about this book: Whether or not readers relate to the specifics of this father-son relationship — whether or not, say, you have ever had to administer tracheostomy care — it’s impossible not to recognize the joys and heartbreaks of our shared human condition. The word I wrote most frequently in the margins of my copy was, YES ... Humor may provide momentary respite, but what keeps this family afloat throughout the long months of Henry’s illness, hospitalizations and surgeries is their devotion to one another ... may be a tribute to a lost son and the family who survives him; it may be a hand outstretched to bereaved parents who feel alone on their planet of grief; but most of all, it is a hopeful plea to people everywhere to make choices, large and small, guided by love. What a world it would be if we did ... All the more reason this radiant memoir deserves the highest admiration. Knowing he was attempting the impossible, Rob Delaney set out to do it anyway.
CJ Hauser
RaveNew York Times Book ReviewThat’s what makes this book both universal and exciting. It’s about the breaking of habits, about consciously developing agency over one’s own fate, and about the relief, wonder and even joy that might follow that grief ... Hauser builds her life’s inventory out of deconstructed personal narratives, resulting in a reading experience that’s rich like a complicated dessert — not for wolfing down but for savoring in small bites. As she travels back and forth through personal history, she strings scenes together without excessive connective tissue ... She trusts us to follow along and get the gist ... A delightfully wide assortment of literary and cultural digressions enrich Hauser’s musings, making her book a lot of fun in a brainy, melancholic way ... The stories may be different for each of us, but the patterns reveal what we have in common as human beings. What a vital sense of connection both writer and reader get out of the experience ... there’s more to this memoir in essays than breakups and so much more to the book than the essay that started it all. An intellectually vigorous and emotionally resonant account of how a self gets created over time, The Crane Wife will satisfy and inspire anyone who has ever asked, \'How did I get here, and what happens now?\'
Delia Ephron
RaveWashington PostAs titles go, it’s an impressive combination of witty, sad and memorable — just like the book itself ... We can trust her not to romanticize life’s big moments. Monumental though they may be, they are often messy, confusing, and oddly timed — and Ephron is going to be straight with us about it ... Ephron is not sugarcoating this story, remember? Things get dark ... Breaking sentences and phrases into speaking rhythms, Ephron encourages us not to see her prose on the page so much as to hear a story told in her voice ... Ephron made it to the other side of her illness, a vantage point from which she could look back and craft her story with a perspective those writers didn’t live to have. But she also never loses sight of the fact that while a book’s ending might be considered happy or sad depending on where the plot stops, all of us human beings are headed for the same ending sooner or later ... Although death saturates this book, it is far from a downer. To the emphatic contrary, it is a joy. As much as Ephron honors the true depths of fear, sickness, and sorrow, she also celebrates with humor and awe the great fortune of small thrills ... That’s the singular, lovely magic of this particular memoir by this particular writer about this particular slice of her life. When she examines \'life and death in close focus, side by side,\' she reminds us that darkness makes the light look even brighter.
Hiro Arikawa, Trans. by Philip Gabriel
PositiveThe Washington Post\"The sections in which we find out how and why Satoru came to love these people provide more than incidental backstory. In fact, some of Arikawa’s best storytelling happens in these passages ... Occasionally, Nana’s understanding of the human world feels like a bit of a stretch ... It may make you cry, just a little, but it will also make you take stock of your friendships and ask yourself: If you could take a road trip to be reunited with just a few people from your past, whom would you visit?\
Sally Field
RaveParnassus MusingWhen I read Sally Field’s memoir, In Pieces, the first time, I didn’t move from my sofa for three hours. After I finished, I picked up my phone, which was pinging with texts from fellow Parnassus staffers asking, How’s the book? What did you think? It took me a minute to figure out how to respond. Then I texted back one word, in all caps: SURPRISING ... Field’s memoir shines brightest and stuns most when she writes about family. Revealing disturbing events from her childhood and how they impacted her life, she opens up a recurring theme of damage and healing ... Reading In Pieces feels like having a glass of wine with a wise, kind, funny friend who isn’t afraid to get real with you about the hard stuff.
