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A review by sarahfonseca
All That Is Bitter and Sweet by Ashley Judd
2.0
This was a stall out.
Adore the Judds and have even enjoyed hearing Ashley speak to her personal grief and trials in very recent years, but this memoir was turning into another Mother Hunger entirely too fast: By which I mean, I open my mind to a popular authority on healing only to have her attempt to lobotomize me by insulting or mischaracterizing lesbianism, sex work, people of color, so on and so forth.
I believe Judd is an intelligent broad, enjoyable performer, and capable scribe. All That's Bitter may benefit bereft and/or soul-searching white suburbanites who encounter an unprecedented hardship or fork in the road of their own lives, and especially those who do not pay mind to front matter.
Takes an hour or more to get through the book's pretext, which includes a forward by Nicholas Kristoff; a prologue detailing one of Judd's missions to the Democratic Republic of Congo; blurbs from Morgan Freeman, Gloria Steinem, Desmond Tutu, Marianne Williamson; and epigraphs from Kahil Gibran, Thomas Kempis, and Rabbi Hillel. Paradoxically, this international and interdisciplinary cast of scenes and human rights characters keeps one from seeing the humanity which Judd's lived biography is poised to offer.
Instead, Judd and/or her editors chose legitimization, obfuscating her amid a crowd of impoverished, besieged, nameless, faceless children in the book's prologue, likely triggering many a reader looking for Judd beneath her initial prose's metaphors: these human shields.
Adore the Judds and have even enjoyed hearing Ashley speak to her personal grief and trials in very recent years, but this memoir was turning into another Mother Hunger entirely too fast: By which I mean, I open my mind to a popular authority on healing only to have her attempt to lobotomize me by insulting or mischaracterizing lesbianism, sex work, people of color, so on and so forth.
I believe Judd is an intelligent broad, enjoyable performer, and capable scribe. All That's Bitter may benefit bereft and/or soul-searching white suburbanites who encounter an unprecedented hardship or fork in the road of their own lives, and especially those who do not pay mind to front matter.
Takes an hour or more to get through the book's pretext, which includes a forward by Nicholas Kristoff; a prologue detailing one of Judd's missions to the Democratic Republic of Congo; blurbs from Morgan Freeman, Gloria Steinem, Desmond Tutu, Marianne Williamson; and epigraphs from Kahil Gibran, Thomas Kempis, and Rabbi Hillel. Paradoxically, this international and interdisciplinary cast of scenes and human rights characters keeps one from seeing the humanity which Judd's lived biography is poised to offer.
Instead, Judd and/or her editors chose legitimization, obfuscating her amid a crowd of impoverished, besieged, nameless, faceless children in the book's prologue, likely triggering many a reader looking for Judd beneath her initial prose's metaphors: these human shields.