{"id":7757,"date":"2026-11-03T11:50:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-03T11:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7757"},"modified":"2026-11-03T11:50:00","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T11:50:00","slug":"karmic-math-by-tobias-maxwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7757","title":{"rendered":"Karmic Math by Tobias Maxwell"},"content":{"rendered":"

Content warnings: Child sexual abuse<\/em><\/p>\n

A sensitive, utterly riveting autobiography about a life of countless reinventions<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In Karmic Math<\/em>, Tobias Maxwell deftly explores sexual abuse, addiction, escaping working-class Ontario, and reconciling with sexuality, gender, spirituality, and artistic callings.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe name on my birth certificate is Joseph Denis Rh\u00e9al Allaire. That\u2019s probably the most difficult admission I\u2019m going to disclose in this entire book\u2014not the molestation or the drugs, not the arrests or the assaults, and not all of the addictive behaviors.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Born into a working class, French-Canadian Catholic family in 1950s Cornwall, Ontario, Tobias Maxwell\u2019s life unfolds as a series of explosive challenges. His early identification with femininity and dressing as a girl triggers his volatile father to tear all of his clothes off in a visceral, formative moment and sets the stage for decades of self-denial before finally embracing questions of gender and sexuality.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

These unspoken confusions compound with other horrific encounters\u201413-year-old Maxwell becomes the victim of a pedophile, Richard Hickerson, and spends his high school years caught between drugs, an addiction to pornography, and the older predator. Yet the book expands far beyond such early experiences to encompass a life lived in the theater, in and out of academia before pivoting into counseling work, weathering assaults, living in New York and LA, finding Buddhism, and forging relationships along the way.<\/p>\n

Maxwell\u2019s discussions of pedophilia, drug abuse, and small-town identity are bracing in their candor, intelligence, and sensitivity. Hickerson\u2019s predations are given painfully graphic depiction, as are Maxwell\u2019s confused, teenage responses. The shame that is so endemic to victims of childhood sexual assault is addressed head on, as are the uncomfortable realities of feeling connected or even dependent on an abuser.<\/p>\n

Cornwall, the site of Maxwell\u2019s youth and the place he returns to later in life, is made into more than a backdrop for childhood trauma and becomes an active participant in his self understanding. It\u2019s a place of rumors, an emblem of what teenage-hood looked like in the 60s and 70s, and a case study of how conservative images of gender, sexuality, and creative expression can reverberate across a lifetime. The fact that Maxwell returns to Cornwall as his autobiography concludes creates an arc that is uncanny in its sense of completion and satisfaction. Here we see the mythic story of homecoming embedded into the reality of a checkered life that allows for Maxwell to see the place he comes from anew and redress old traumas as an adult.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe day of the funeral, my morning chanting was focused on the profundity of life, but, when I reached the funeral home, my concentration promptly became lost with the mundane sah\u0101 world of illusions. Kneeling at the coffin, chanting again softly, I couldn\u2019t help but reach out and hug her coffin for a spell\u2014so odd, considering my morbid fear of coffins then, an offshoot of losing my close friend in the second grade. Micheline\u2019s coffin became a wooden blanket, a modest barrier between her and my hugs.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The entire book is propelled by crisp, fluid prose and an authorial confidence that makes Maxwell\u2019s overflowing life immediately graspable. A sense of maturity and of having wrestled with, reconciled, and integrated the events recounted is present everywhere. Even the moments of violence\u2014like when Maxwell jumps out of a car he\u2019s driving to escape a violent patient and then leaping into the back of pick-up truck to escape\u2014contain a sense of the totality of what came before and what comes after. Such scenes are often anchored by an object: the glasses that flew off his face when he jumped from the moving car, which were recovered, miraculously intact, later by a friend. This use of detail concretizes a scene and allows Maxwell to naturally integrate a reflective, analytic mode. He can explain the connection between grooming and pornography, describe schizophrenia and the experience of PTSD without allowing exposition to halt the narrative. That clarity is especially affecting near the end, when watching The Danish Girl reawakens questions stirred and suppressed decades earlier by wearing women\u2019s clothes and being punished by his father. Gathering these and other reverberations, Maxwell\u2019s assured prose turns a complicated personal history into a lucid account of survival, joy, and hard won self-recognition.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, there had never been a deep-seated need to express my femininity because, without even trying, there was rarely a day that went by without someone addressing me as \u2018ma\u2019am\u2019 or \u2018miss.\u2019 It happens to this day, and it always brings a smile to my face.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Karmic Math<\/em> is a fascinating autobiography about moving through trauma, wrestling with questions of identity and sexuality, and pursuing creative outlets to forge a path that leads from small town Canada to New York, LA, and back again.<\/p>\n

The post Karmic Math by Tobias Maxwell<\/a> appeared first on Independent Book Review<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Content warnings: Child sexual abuse A sensitive, utterly riveting autobiography about a life of countless reinventions In Karmic Math, Tobias Maxwell deftly explores sexual abuse, addiction, escaping working-class Ontario, and reconciling with sexuality, gender, spirituality, and artistic callings. \u201cThe name on my birth certificate is Joseph Denis Rh\u00e9al Allaire. That\u2019s probably the most difficult admission […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7757"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7757\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}