What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B000BKHEZ8 | Format: PDF
What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love Description
What Remains is a vivid and haunting memoir about a girl from a working-class town who becomes an award-winning television producer and marries a prince, Anthony Radziwill, one of a long line of Polish royals and nephew of President John F. Kennedy. Carole Radziwill's story is part fairy tale, part tragedy. She tells both with great candor and wit.
Carole grew up in a small suburb with a large, eccentric cast of characters. She spent her childhood summers with her grandparents and an odd assortment of aunts and uncles in their poorly plumbed A-frame on the banks of a muddy creek in upstate New York.
At the age of 19, Carole struck out for New York City to find a different life. Her career at ABC News led her to the refugee camps of Cambodia, to a bunker in Tel Aviv, to the scene of the Menendez murders. Her marriage led her into the old world of European nobility and the newer world of American aristocracy.
What Remains begins with loss and returns to loss. A small plane plunges into the ocean, carrying John Kennedy, Anthony's cousin, and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, Carole's closest friend. Three weeks later Anthony dies of cancer. The summer of the plane crash, the four friends were meant to be cherishing Anthony's last days. Instead, Carole and Anthony mourned John and Carolyn, even as Carole planned her husband's memorial.
Carole Radziwill has an anthropologist's sensibility and a journalist's eye. She writes about families, their customs, their secrets, and their tangled intimacies with remarkable acuity and humanity. She explores the complexities of marriage, the importance of friendship, and the challenges of self-invention with unflinching honesty. This is a compelling story of love, loss, and, ultimately, resilience.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 5 hours and 56 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Abridged
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: September 22, 2005
- Language: English
- ASIN: B000BKHEZ8
I bought this book in an airport because of the cover. The cover photo is one I have in my bedroom. I was in a huge hurry to get a book for the plane ride and I didn't notice the author's name particularly.
I read the entire book on that plane ride and it was an out of body experience for me because I have just recently finished helping my sister die. The book reviewer who treated it as though it were a "Kennedy" book disguised as a memoir and alluded that she was somehow capitalizing on a famous name to sell a book obviously isn't in this club that I now live in. Grief is a horrific world. It's the story of your life and I think she had to tell it to survive.
First of all, it's well written (no joke, the woman is a journalist---they practice the craft daily). This reviewer claims the book is "padded" with her childhood experiences. Excuse me, it's a memoir ! ! ! Childhood MEMORIES are not padding in a MEMOIR. The fact that her marriage -- to a person who is happens to be the maternal cousin of John Kennedy---dominates the book is because that was the biggest "story" in her life. So, naturally, a good writer of a MEMOIR will emphasize the biggest story of their life. And, it's not the biggest story of her life because he had a famous name. It's the biggest story of her life because her husband was handed a death sentence and she had to help him live knowing he was going to die.
This is NOT a "Kennedy" book (didn't know that was a category), it's a memoir that does a most excellent job of describing being in the inner circle of a young person who has been handed a death sentence. I know because I have lived it.
For this author it was her husband. For me, it was my younger sister who got her death sentence at 36.
Having watched a loved one die slowly of cancer, I had a visceral reaction to this terribly sad story of a young woman who meets the man of her dreams, through him meets the female friend of her heart, and does NOT live happily ever after. Because on the last day of their romantic honeymoon, the happy young couple finds a small lump on his abdomen...
I applaud the fact that the "Kennedy-ness" of this story takes a back seat. The young woman, Carole DeFalco, meets and marries Anthony Radziwill, son of Jacqueline Kennedy's sister Lee. And the friends of their heart are John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife Carolyn. Is it really that important? These are people, with real feelings and real tragedies that no amount of fame and money can stop.
Unlike some other reviewers, I found Carole's description of her decidedly middle-class upbringing engaging, funny, and interesting. Yes, I got the point--she was not raised with a silver spoon in her mouth--but it did not offend me, rather it delighted me.
What really drew me in, though, was her unblinkingly honest tale of what it really feels like to have a loved one slowly eaten away by this vicious disease. You want to run; so did she. You nastily wish the sick person would just get it over with and die; so did she. You are in the depths of despair so deep that you don't even recognize your own depression; so was she. You feel overwhelming guilt for having any feelings of your own; so did she. You fight to be able to control the uncontrollable; so did she.
But right beside her, offering unconditional love, support, humor, fun, and above all, life, was her dear friend Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her irrascible husband John, who was raised with Anthony and considered him a brother.
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