“Do I stay sober?” she asks at the end of this painfully honest, insightful memoir; “I’m still here. But how can I be sure...
A new mother recounts her struggle with alcoholism.
After three and a half years sober, Bydlowska celebrated the birth of her son with a glass of champagne—and then another and another. That party began her relapse into alcoholism: drinking, lying to her loving and patient boyfriend, hiding vodka bottles in her baby’s diaper bag and sock drawer, dropping concerned friends, and blacking out again and again. “I prefer drinking to anything in the world,” she admits, “sex, food, sleep. My child, my lover, anything.” But alcoholism, she writes, “is not drinking, just like hemophilia is not bleeding. You can’t slow down, cut down on your alcoholism. You can’t unlearn its language.” Although she was elated by her child’s birth, wanted desperately to be a responsible mother, and feared that her son would be taken from her if she kept drinking, she simply could not stop. Drinking was not only a desire, but also “a need that’s psychological—sustenance necessary to keep troubling thoughts away. The thoughts of guilt and worry.” Those obsessive thoughts were “never easily distracted,” making her addiction feel like “a body part. I can’t get rid of it any easier than I can cut off my own arm or poke my eye out.” Being an alcoholic also required considerable stealth: drinking where her boyfriend would not see her, staggering purchases at different liquor stores to deflect notice, and always keeping a supply of mints or juice to mask traces of alcohol on her breath. Finally, she agreed to go into rehab when her blackouts put her child in danger. But after rehab, she drank again. Rehab failed her, Bydlowska writes, because she was not desperate enough to want sobriety. Now she is sober at last, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.
“Do I stay sober?” she asks at the end of this painfully honest, insightful memoir; “I’m still here. But how can I be sure of anything else?” Addiction, she knows, is forever.Pub Date: June 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-312650-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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