Official Review: Ain’t Easy by Barbara Carter
Posted: 17 Jul 2020, 16:22
[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Ain’t Easy" by Barbara Carter.]
Ain’t Easy by Barbara Carter told a captivating story of a woman experiencing various adolescent struggles while working towards finding her own identity in a small town in the Maritimes. She wrote a memoir that was hard to put down, telling how her younger self battled with addiction, abuse, and a struggle to find healthy, lasting relationships.
The memoir opened by emerging the reader in an 18-year-old Barbara’s problematic relationship with the emotionally distant, much older, Adam. She seeks someone who makes her feel wanted, but Adam’s emotional distance and obsession with his single focus of building his boat leaves her spiralling deeper into a world of alcoholism and short-lived sexual encounters. Through emotional and physical abuse, this early relationship, along with a fragmented self-image created by a turbulent early life at home puts Barbara in a very unstable state. For the rest of the memoir, Barbara chronicles her life, leaving out no details of sexual encounters with many men in her social circle while she struggles to find stability and genuine love. Her heartbreaking stories and ability to profoundly write about them show her strength as a woman, and it was very powerful to read her poetry and prose in this book.
My favorite aspect of the book was definitely the author’s inclusion of her poetry, all of which was written chronologically during the events that she describes in her book. Her poems offered a raw, emotional perspective of her state during her tribulations. They offered a deeper look at how she processed the darker events of her life, allowing a depth of expression that can be hard to parallel with prose. Additionally, I liked how she included poems throughout the whole book; you could see how she matured, both as a young woman, and a young artist. I’m very glad that these poems were included in the book.
My least favorite aspect of the book was the repeated list of song lyrics from popular songs at the time. While it makes a great deal of sense that popular songs of the seventies would be significant to an 18-22 year old, their repeated inclusion created a shallower feeling in the midst of otherwise deep reflection and introspection.
Overall, I am giving this book three out of four stars. It told a riveting story, and I was unable to put it down whenever I was reading it. However, there were typos and some minor grammatical errors throughout, which is the major factor preventing a perfect score. I think that the author used a perfect level of detail when telling her life’s story. There were enough details to make you feel like you intimately knew the reader at that point in her life, but the book was not drowned with minor details that made reading it a chore.
I would highly recommend this book to any readers interested in hearing a young woman’s story of living with alcoholism, abuse, and arguably, sex addiction. Given the nature of Carter’s story, I would not recommend this book to any readers who are not comfortable with explicit language or sexual content. Even if there are readers intimidated by poetry, I still think that this book is worth the read for the stories Barbara tells.
******
Ain’t Easy
View: on Bookshelves
Ain’t Easy by Barbara Carter told a captivating story of a woman experiencing various adolescent struggles while working towards finding her own identity in a small town in the Maritimes. She wrote a memoir that was hard to put down, telling how her younger self battled with addiction, abuse, and a struggle to find healthy, lasting relationships.
The memoir opened by emerging the reader in an 18-year-old Barbara’s problematic relationship with the emotionally distant, much older, Adam. She seeks someone who makes her feel wanted, but Adam’s emotional distance and obsession with his single focus of building his boat leaves her spiralling deeper into a world of alcoholism and short-lived sexual encounters. Through emotional and physical abuse, this early relationship, along with a fragmented self-image created by a turbulent early life at home puts Barbara in a very unstable state. For the rest of the memoir, Barbara chronicles her life, leaving out no details of sexual encounters with many men in her social circle while she struggles to find stability and genuine love. Her heartbreaking stories and ability to profoundly write about them show her strength as a woman, and it was very powerful to read her poetry and prose in this book.
My favorite aspect of the book was definitely the author’s inclusion of her poetry, all of which was written chronologically during the events that she describes in her book. Her poems offered a raw, emotional perspective of her state during her tribulations. They offered a deeper look at how she processed the darker events of her life, allowing a depth of expression that can be hard to parallel with prose. Additionally, I liked how she included poems throughout the whole book; you could see how she matured, both as a young woman, and a young artist. I’m very glad that these poems were included in the book.
My least favorite aspect of the book was the repeated list of song lyrics from popular songs at the time. While it makes a great deal of sense that popular songs of the seventies would be significant to an 18-22 year old, their repeated inclusion created a shallower feeling in the midst of otherwise deep reflection and introspection.
Overall, I am giving this book three out of four stars. It told a riveting story, and I was unable to put it down whenever I was reading it. However, there were typos and some minor grammatical errors throughout, which is the major factor preventing a perfect score. I think that the author used a perfect level of detail when telling her life’s story. There were enough details to make you feel like you intimately knew the reader at that point in her life, but the book was not drowned with minor details that made reading it a chore.
I would highly recommend this book to any readers interested in hearing a young woman’s story of living with alcoholism, abuse, and arguably, sex addiction. Given the nature of Carter’s story, I would not recommend this book to any readers who are not comfortable with explicit language or sexual content. Even if there are readers intimidated by poetry, I still think that this book is worth the read for the stories Barbara tells.
******
Ain’t Easy
View: on Bookshelves
