Roberta Reb Allen's Blog: Examined Lives
November 29, 2018
Some Great Reviews
Examined Lives has gotten some great editorial reviews from the three major review services for self-published books. Here are some fair-use excerpts:
"This is a candid and throughly researched and documented tale. Allen writes without judgement, letting readers get to know the characters. . . .Overall, this is a well written and researched story. It should resonate with wide readership, particularly those touched by mental illness."--BlueInk Reviews.
"The writing is clean and crisp--direct, but peppered with allusions to Svengali, La Bohème, and other cultural touchstones. The prose captures emotions, relationships, and greater truths well, sometimes in just a few evocative brushstrokes. Sentences are declarative and images are concrete, including of mashing potatoes, proofing galleys, and feeling a sharp sense of isolation at university. The sparing use of direct quotations is effective, reserved for emotional truths. Frequent and candid family photographs help to illustrate the events described." -- Foreword Clarion Reviews
"Allen's skill as a storyteller is apparent right from the start of the book. . . .The author not only sheds light on the disturbing mid-20th century practice of lobotomy (which was mostly performed on female patients) but also thoughtfully examines the ramifications of such practices--and mental illness generally--on subsequent generations. Allen stares boldly into the the darkness but manages to find in her own life a glimmering alternative.--Kirkus Reviews
"This is a candid and throughly researched and documented tale. Allen writes without judgement, letting readers get to know the characters. . . .Overall, this is a well written and researched story. It should resonate with wide readership, particularly those touched by mental illness."--BlueInk Reviews.
"The writing is clean and crisp--direct, but peppered with allusions to Svengali, La Bohème, and other cultural touchstones. The prose captures emotions, relationships, and greater truths well, sometimes in just a few evocative brushstrokes. Sentences are declarative and images are concrete, including of mashing potatoes, proofing galleys, and feeling a sharp sense of isolation at university. The sparing use of direct quotations is effective, reserved for emotional truths. Frequent and candid family photographs help to illustrate the events described." -- Foreword Clarion Reviews
"Allen's skill as a storyteller is apparent right from the start of the book. . . .The author not only sheds light on the disturbing mid-20th century practice of lobotomy (which was mostly performed on female patients) but also thoughtfully examines the ramifications of such practices--and mental illness generally--on subsequent generations. Allen stares boldly into the the darkness but manages to find in her own life a glimmering alternative.--Kirkus Reviews
May 23, 2018
Walter Freeman and Me
I never met Walter Freeman, the man who was the very public face of lobotomies as cures for mental illness in the mid-20th century and at whose own reckoning performed some 3,500 such operations. Performing a lobotomy, without mask or gloves, in front of curious bystanders was one of his publicity stunts. The procedure he used extensively involved hammering an ice pick-like device through the eye socket and wiggling it back and forth to severe connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain.
Freeman performed that operation on my mother in 1950. He saw her for the first time on a Friday, pronounced her a paranoid schizophrenic, and did the procedure the following Monday. The man wasted no time.
The operation drastically changed my mother’s life and so my own. Her diary and scrapbooks reveal her to have been a vivacious, competent woman. She came to Chicago on her 20th birthday and began her rise in the hospitality industry, starting with serving at the lunch counter at a busy Walgreen’s Drugstore, where she ended up supervising 12 other waitresses, to serving as room captain at the Camellia Room of the Drake Hotel, frequented by the likes of Greta Garbo and Clark Gable. In her off hours she devoured the nightlife, visiting numerous clubs on any one night with a string of young swain, several of whom wanted to marry her.
After the lobotomy, her drive and “sparkle,” as my aunt put it, was taken from her and in fact she ended up being “adjudged insane” and institutionalized for a period of time.
What led to her having the lobotomy? That is the story I tell in my book Examined Lives, based on thousands of pages of family letters, diaries, scrapbooks, medical records, an unpublished novel, poetry, and photographs. And, yes of course, on the writings of Walter Freeman.
Freeman performed that operation on my mother in 1950. He saw her for the first time on a Friday, pronounced her a paranoid schizophrenic, and did the procedure the following Monday. The man wasted no time.
The operation drastically changed my mother’s life and so my own. Her diary and scrapbooks reveal her to have been a vivacious, competent woman. She came to Chicago on her 20th birthday and began her rise in the hospitality industry, starting with serving at the lunch counter at a busy Walgreen’s Drugstore, where she ended up supervising 12 other waitresses, to serving as room captain at the Camellia Room of the Drake Hotel, frequented by the likes of Greta Garbo and Clark Gable. In her off hours she devoured the nightlife, visiting numerous clubs on any one night with a string of young swain, several of whom wanted to marry her.
After the lobotomy, her drive and “sparkle,” as my aunt put it, was taken from her and in fact she ended up being “adjudged insane” and institutionalized for a period of time.
What led to her having the lobotomy? That is the story I tell in my book Examined Lives, based on thousands of pages of family letters, diaries, scrapbooks, medical records, an unpublished novel, poetry, and photographs. And, yes of course, on the writings of Walter Freeman.
