Norma Jean's Sun, Memoir Reviews & Comment

Your candle burned-out long before; Your legend ever did.

Those simple words from Elton John's famous song, "Candle in the Wind", could easily apply to the lives of many people. To Kris Courtney, these words touched his own heart at a time when he mourned the death of his mother, Norma Jean. A beautiful woman in her youth, Norma Jean met the challenges of life with grace and dignity and perseverance. She did not give up when her first and only child was born severely crippled. She wept when the doctors put her newborn baby into a body cast in an attempt to straighten his spine and his limbs. Through the countless surgeries during his grow-up years to correct his hands, arms, legs, feet, Norma Jean would declare with great insistence: "Fight, Kris, fight." One defeat after another did not set her back until, in the end, the fight was her own, a battle against cancer that she could not beat.

Norma Jean's Sun is Kris Courtney's tribute to a mother that sacrificed everything for her severely crippled son. Courtney is an artist in both paint and words. In his touching memoir, he captures the essence of a tragic life and the beauty that lies beneath the surface. His words paint a picture of a hardship and a suffering that only few could imagine. Using a painter's brush, Courtney scratches out his emotional story in an abstraction of language that parallels a life that just will not give up. As his mother told him many times, this remarkably talented man continues to "Fight".

Norma Jean's Sun is a story about differences and the tragedies that life presents a person who is visibly different from the rest.

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