I COULD LIVE HERE FOREVER

A writer falls in love with a musician, but their relationship isn't all beauty and light.

When Leah Kempler, a fiction fellow in the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, meets Charlie Nelson, a musician, she’s immediately smitten. He’s beautiful, and their first-date conversation is easy and effortless. She soon finds out, though, that he still lives with his parents (who are kind and wonderful people, but still…) and that he isn’t allowed to be in charge of his own money. Her friends are politely dismissive of him, and he seems uncomfortable sharing her with other people. He admits that he's a recovering heroin addict, but when his behavior becomes erratic and even stalkerlike—he sends long paranoid texts, shows up at Leah’s door at all hours, or disappears for days at a time—Leah has to acknowledge that there's something wrong: He's started using again. And this is the cycle of tragedy that Charlie and his relationship with Leah and the book as a whole show us in stark detail: Drug addiction is an illness that's extremely difficult to cure. As Charlie himself says, “Imagine you’re in pain…but you know that…all you have to do is press [a] button, and that pain will vanish.…That button is heroin.” The novel is about more than Charlie’s struggles, of course. Leah’s writing, and her friendships with her fellow fiction writers; her lingering pain at having been abandoned by her mother at a young age; her complicated relationships with her own father and brothers—these all get meaningful air time, and we come to understand that Leah is a talented, complex woman who understands intellectually that Charlie is not good for her but who loves him all the same even as she knows that she can’t save him. Halperin humanizes the tragedy of drug addiction through Charlie, who is sweet and kind and loving and also irreparably damaged.

Wistful, honest, and heartbreaking.