Unlocking the Doctor's Little Black Bag Book

This memoir is ostensibly about Mary Pipher's experience of achieving success as an author (with her book Reviving Ophelia), but finding she couldn't handle it and having a meltdown, and then reaching a kind of peace through Buddhist practice (hence the title).

Unfortunately, the majority of the book is not about that at all. Instead, we find out all about her family: the full story of her parents' lives up until Pipher is born (and after), as well as descriptions of Pipher's grandparents and all of her many aunts and uncles. Then we get into Pipher's childhood. From there it apparently continues on through all of Pipher's life, and we don't hear anything about the meltdown, the peace-seeking, and the Buddhism until over 150 pages into this 250-page book.

I say "apparently" because I gave up on page 70 after I looked ahead and saw what I was in store for. Don't get me wrong, I understand that some background is important to understanding who Pipher is today and why she couldn't handle the success of Reviving Ophelia. But there shouldn't be so much background that the ostensible point of the book becomes an afterthought. This book was, quite simply, not what it claimed to be.

This might have been OK if the stuff about Pipher's life and her family was written in an interesting way, but it isn't. It's plodding and repetitive. A disappointment all around.

When I first put this book aside, I refrained from giving it a rating. I thought I might go back and try again one day. However, the further I get from the book, the less I can imagine going back to it. So I'm changing my rating to one star, the grade I give to all books I cannot imagine finishing.