Hard evidence that “no matter how long it’s gone on, no matter how bad it is,” an addict’s life can move to higher ground.
Transformative experiences that led to sobriety, chronicled by 44 people in the public eye and compiled by one of their own.
Lawford knows a thing or two about alcoholism, heavy drug use and denial, which he disarmingly chronicled in Symptoms of Withdrawal (2005). His “moment of clarity” is not an unfamiliar one: He tanked and was a step from pulling the trigger when he surrendered to honesty and got help. Such revelatory epiphanies are as mysterious as they are sublime, and here they make for good storytelling. (They also serve as good examples, readers will hope; Lawford points out that more than 22 million people in the United States have problems with alcohol or drugs, and fewer than ten percent seek treatment.) Personal testimonies by celebrities ranging from Alec Baldwin to Buzz Aldrin bespeak the many faces that substance abuse can take and the equal variety of the illuminations that point people toward change. Some have a religious tone, some are dramatic, others subdued but deeply felt. A few will leave you wondering, such as Richard Dreyfuss’s recurring vision of a little girl dressed in pink, an image he couldn’t shake even while he was busy with drugs, booze and orgies. More than a few will leave you cringing, like Martin Sheen’s ugly encounter with his son Charlie and his painful realization that Charlie’s subsequent drug problems were partly his responsibility. “I taught him everything he knew,” the recovering alcoholic admits. An angel in the form of a no-bullshit therapist came to folksinger Judy Collins’s rescue; a mirror in his solitary-confinement cell did the same for musician/federal prisoner Dejuan Verrett. Each story holds the individual fascination of its particular circumstances; all of them get their oomph from punchy compression and plainspoken honesty.
Hard evidence that “no matter how long it’s gone on, no matter how bad it is,” an addict’s life can move to higher ground.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-145621-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
A piercing, heartbreaking reminder that “loss doesn’t end.”
Poignant account of a young woman’s struggle to accept a parent’s dying.
Describing the hardship of watching her mother Jackie slowly succumb to breast cancer after a nine-year battle, Romm (The Mother Garden, 2007) immediately makes it clear which side she’s on: life, at any cost. Throughout this brutally honest account of Jackie’s final three weeks, she derides the hospice and its workers who “build the boat of morphine and pillows” to death. By contrast, she clung to every shred of possibility, every technique or piece of furniture that could prolong her mother’s life and give Romm back the strong woman who raised her. Into her chronicle of these last weeks, the author weaves details of her own life, which was tinged with cancer’s long, erosive mark; her mother was diagnosed when she was just 19. Romm examines her childhood, work and relationships, at times using their reactions to Jackie’s illness as a barometer, at times allowing the cancer to influence her perspective. The author and her father, both tense with grief, weren’t always in agreement as they grappled with the impossible task of doing what’s best for a loved one in pain without sacrificing a single moment of connection. At times, the only bright spot for the author was her new puppy, a bystander to the heartache with an irrepressible joy for life. Romm bemoans the world’s inability to guide us during a time of loss. “Much gets said about healing, but what of the violence of the actual event?” she writes. None of the hospice’s CDs or pamphlets, she found, offered anything but clichés. In response, the final chapter includes 12 blank pages meant to represent one woman’s ordeal as unique and yet collective.
A piercing, heartbreaking reminder that “loss doesn’t end.”Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6788-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
A revealing glimpse into the trauma wrought by eating disorders—especially important for the afflicted and those who care...
A young writer recounts the trials and treatment of her eating disorder.
Midway through graduate school, 22-year-old Johns checked herself into the Wisconsin Eating Disorders Center, where she would spend 88 days trying to break the self-destructive regimen of restricting and purging that had plagued her since age 13. The memoir tracks her time at the EDC and the many harrowing experiences that led her there. Since she technically wasn’t underweight or morbidly obese, and still menstruated, the 130-pound Johns was diagnosed with EDNOS, or an Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, what she terms an “island between anorexia and bulimia, a no-man’s-land that borrows from both diagnoses.” Years of limiting herself to 500 calories per day and compensating when her intake exceeded that by popping diet pills, chugging Diet Coke, purging and frantically exercising when overwhelmed all resulted in Johns developing multiple health problems, including severe heart irregularities. The author often narrates in present tense and occasionally second person to mimic the compulsive urgency of her fraught state of being: “There is no way out, so you binge on and purge an entire tube of Pillsbury rolls (half-cooked—you are too impatient to wait for them to bake), an entire box of chocolate Malt-O-Meal, a pint of Godiva ice cream, and a mug of chai tea.” Spare and unyielding, Johns’s prose distills the pain of her self-loathing while objectively charting the efforts of the center’s staff to help her and her fellow “Sisterhood of the Starving” curb and, hopefully, overcome such frenetic tendencies.
A revealing glimpse into the trauma wrought by eating disorders—especially important for the afflicted and those who care for them.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58005-274-0
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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