My Rating: 4 stars
Over the years, I’ve read my fair share of memoirs written
by people ranging from celebrities to business people to complete strangers
whom I had never heard of until the moment I read their memoir. A lot of people I know don’t like to read memoirs
because there are too many out there that are written in an overly-pretentious
manner or, worse yet, may come across as genuine when in reality they are
not. Even though I share these same
concerns when it comes to memoirs, I still read them because occasionally,
there may be a gem in there that I would have regretted passing up on reading. Min Kym’s Gone:
A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung – a heartfelt memoir about a violin prodigy
who loses the precious instrument that defined her entire life – is definitely
one of those gems.
Before I go into my thoughts on the book, let me just say
that from a writing perspective, there were issues – lots of them. In addition to the many grammatical and
sentence structure errors, the writing was a bit all over the place at times,
which was distracting and broke the flow of the story at certain points. Normally, I would give a book with such flaws
a low rating, but I didn’t this time because of several reasons, the main one being
that the version I read was an “uncorrected proof” copy so I already expected that
there would be errors. For me, I’m
generally okay with overlooking these types of errors as long as everything is
fixed before the final published version goes into print. The other reason of course is the fact that
this book is a memoir, a personal story written by someone who does not write
for a living, so I tend to be a bit more lenient with what I am willing to
tolerate where the writing is concerned.
For those who may have lower tolerance in this area, I would suggest
reading the final published version (and hope that the editors caught the
errors and fixed them). The third -- and
most important – reason is explained in detail below….
Surprisingly, this memoir affected me on a personal level
like no other memoir that I’ve read up to this point has done. Perhaps it is because I share some cultural
similarities with the author Min Kym (more on that in a minute), plus a few
aspects of her personality as well as some of the experiences she went through
parallel my own in certain areas. [For the record – no, I am not a child
prodigy and I do not play any instruments, nor am I musically inclined (I love
listening to music but can’t sing to save my life, lol). To be honest, many of the music-related
references in the book were completely lost on me and I didn’t try for even a
minute to keep any of it straight because I knew I couldn’t.] Kym is a Korean woman who grew up in England
while I am a Chinese woman who grew up in the U.S. – we may be from different
countries, but there is the shared cultural identity of being raised by “traditional”
Asian families in the Western world and the struggles this brings about. I was absolutely able to relate to many of
the “issues” she brought up about culture and family and how different –
ridiculous even -- the way of thinking may seem to those who may not have been
brought up with those influences in their lives. Many of the struggles Kym talked about are
things I’ve experienced as well – for example:
the sense of being bound by cultural obligations to do/not do or say/not
say certain things, putting your best face forward and not letting the “weakness”
of our true feelings show, constantly saying yes and letting others manipulate
and take advantage against your better judgment, living the life others want
you to live rather than the life you want to live, going along and putting
everyone else’s needs before your own because it is instilled in you to obey
and not to question...etc. A lot of this
really hit home for me and in a way, it was reassuring to hear someone going
through similar struggles not being afraid to articulate exactly how she felt.
One of the things I appreciated most about Kym’s story was
the honest and genuine way in which she laid everything out in the open – the good,
the bad, and the ugly. Never once did
she deliberately try to paint herself in a good light – instead, she showed us
her true human self, showed us her flaws, her stubborn personality, her raw
emotions. It was almost as though she did
not care whether people would judge her for being foolish, irrational, naïve,
etc. – she just needed to tell her story, to pour her heart out, get what had
been suppressed for so long out of her system….and let the chips fall where
they may. This was a unique aspect of
Kym’s memoir that we don’t often see in other memoirs, which I found refreshing
and for this reason alone is already worth reading.
I would absolutely recommend this book, though as I said
earlier, read the final published version rather than any uncorrected proof or
advance galley versions. I don’t say
this often but this was one book where I regret reading an ARC over an actual
published copy because I feel like I could have done more justice to the book
in my review if I had done so.
Received advance
reader’s copy from Crown Publishing via Penguin First-to-Read program and
NetGalley.
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