An emotionally complex and intensely personal binary memoir of addiction and sustainable love.
The unconventional love story between an emerging author and the troubled man she discovers to be a hard-core drug addict.
Journalist Stellin (How to Travel Practically Anywhere, 2006) and photographer MacIndoe co-narrate their journey from their first flirtatious interaction to his release years later from a short prison term on drug charges and the restarting of their life together. Stellin first met the Scottish MacIndoe in 2002 at a Montauk summer share house; they reunited in 2005 when she was in need of an author photo for a commissioned travel guidebook. Their attraction swiftly became an “obsessive, indulgent connection, which excluded the rest of the world,” as poetic emails were romantically exchanged and a spontaneous trip to Hawaii brought them even closer. During that trip, MacIndoe, an unsuccessfully detoxed addict, had been rationing sips of methadone and cloaking light drug use from Stellin. As his casual fixes regenerated into the full-blown “dark hole” of heroin and crack he’d battled prior to meeting Stellin, MacIndoe’s physical appearance and erratic, quick-tempered behavior revealed voracious dependency that both sabotaged his relationship and landed him at Rikers Island. Stellin’s painful indecision about the fate of their relationship and MacIndoe’s desperate drug-chasing, regret, and resolution to enter rehab are revealed in thoughtful, carefully crafted chapters brimming with personal details and sentiments. Written with great dexterity and fairness, both authors narrate from their individualized perspectives, vacillating over the blooming of their passion and the painful heartbreak and incremental deterioration of their romance. While long-winded in sections, both sides are elegantly and tactfully interpreted. Stellin’s sections are the most compelling, as she wrestles with loving a junkie, respecting herself, and navigating the red tape and legal confusion of MacIndoe’s prison sentence. Emotionally resonant and evenly structured, their tandem chronicle resists overly romanticizing their bittersweet interactions to focus on the dedication and devotion necessary to make their already-complicated relationship survive the fallout of critical hardships.
An emotionally complex and intensely personal binary memoir of addiction and sustainable love.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-88274-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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