A helpful and reassuring model of how ex-partners can put their child’s happiness first.
Smolarski offers a practical and empathetic guide for separated caregivers to building a co-parenting relationship that helps kids flourish.
Shortly after the author separated from her partner, their 6-year-old daughter told her “I feel all alone in the woods!” That distress signal launched Smolarski, a psychotherapist, mediator, and public policy advocate, on a quest to understand what a “good two-home family” might look like and learn how to create one for her own family. In this guide to creating “a co-parenting relationship that allows your child to thrive,” she outlines three different attachment styles and how they affect family interactions and details key principles newly separated caregivers can follow to prioritize their child’s emotional security during challenging times. The author uses brief fictional scenarios to illustrate different ways divorced or separated parents might interact with each other and with their children, discusses the various emotional factors involved, offers exercises to help readers to identify the factors most important to their personal situation, and revisits the same scenarios to show how they might play out differently when the suggested techniques and approaches are applied. The chapters cover the nature of the co-parenting relationship, making decisions, dealing with your child’s emotions (and your own), developing shared values and effective communication, resolving conflicts, and maintaining consistency across two homes. Each chapter ends with a helpful “Now What?” question-and-answer section addressing specific concerns parents may have. Throughout the book, Smolarski emphasizes self-compassion and argues persuasively that one parent can improve family dynamics to reach what she terms a “win-win-win” by implementing her suggestions even when the co-parent isn’t fully on board. Her realistic and relatable examples include diverse family structures, with children of all ages. The explanations of important concepts, such as “hot potato” emotions and the “upstairs and downstairs brain,” are clear and down to earth. Smolarski’s practical tips and ideas are likely to be helpful across a broad range of relationships.
A helpful and reassuring model of how ex-partners can put their child’s happiness first.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781648481840
Page Count: 200
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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