Good morning, destroyer of men's souls : a memoir of women, addiction and love /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A scorching memoir of a love affair with an addict, weaving personal reckoning with psychology and history to understand the nature of addiction, codependency, and our appetite for obsessive love

"Ferocious . . . glints with hard-won truths . . . Aron lights a path through the darkness of her past toward a better future."-- Los Angeles Times

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PARADE

"The disease he has is addiction," Nina Renata Aron writes of her boyfriend, K. "The disease I have is loving him." Their love affair is dramatic, urgent, overwhelming--an intoxicating antidote to the long, lonely days of early motherhood. Soon after they get together, K starts using again, and years of relapses and broken promises follow. Even as his addiction deepens, she stays, convinced she is the one who can get him sober. After an adolescence marred by family trauma and addiction, Nina can't help but feel responsible for those suffering around her. How can she break this pattern? If she leaves K, has she failed him?

Writing in prose at once unflinching and acrobatic, Aron delivers a piercing memoir of romance and addiction, drawing on intimate anecdotes as well as academic research to crack open the long-feminized and overlooked phenomenon of codependency. She shifts between visceral, ferocious accounts of her affair with K and introspective analyses of the part she plays in his addictions, as well as defining moments in the history of codependency, from the temperance movement to the formation of Al-Anon to more recent research in the psychology of addiction. Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls is a blazing, bighearted book that illuminates and adds nuance to the messy tethers between femininity, enabling, and love.

Praise for Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

"Unflinching . . . Aron writes in gripping prose about the thrills and dangers of her own substance use and relationship with K--their weak-kneed passion and wolfish needs, as well as her guilt-ridden enabling and savior-complex optimism." --San Francisco Chronicle

"In Nina Renata Aron's scorching, unvarnished memoir, an addiction story gets spun from the perspective of the helpless partner, the lover too stuck in a dangerous dynamic to find her way out." --Entertainment Weekly

"A raw and eloquently unflinching memoir." --Kirkus Reviews

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Chapter One On a Hunter's Moon, I burned his name. The drummer in my band told me to do it. We were sitting at the bar drinking well whiskeys and cans of beer. A Hunter's Moon is powerful for intention setting, she said, winding her long, chemically straightened hair into an apple fritter-­sized bun atop her head. She secured it not with an elastic but with a wrist flick and a twist of another piece of her hair, some sleight of hand I'd always envied in the girls who could do it. It stayed in place perfectly. She pulled a few baby hairs out to fall in front of her ears, and they made small, wispy parentheses around her face. Fleetwood Mac was playing. Write down what you want and burn it, she said, knocking back the last of her drink. Women suggest these types of things to one another. A Hunter's Moon is powerful for intention setting. This was the kind of oblique advice I was getting a lot. I didn't know where to hook into it, how to listen better to make it feel real, like something I could act on. Still, I let it wash over me, this language I was trying to learn. My earnest, beautiful, California girlfriends, knowing I needed them, were doing their very best, circling with candles and crystals. I welcomed their warmth the way I imagined I was supposed to, with an open, wistful gaze, and slow, New Age nodding. Just that week, one had shown up with a bottle of rosé and made the measured, straight-­faced suggestion that I "sage" him from the premises. This will cleanse your space of him, she said, proffering a bound, faded bundle of expired flora and a lighter. I was constantly cleansing him from my space. Every few days, for example, I'd clean our bathroom, wiping with Lysol-­drenched paper towels the delicate spray of dried blood that lay over most surfaces and reminded me of the splatter of colored dye on the outside of a jawbreaker, the first layer that makes a white paste in your mouth as you suck it away. Living with a junkie involves a lot of effluvia. Everywhere, there are oozes that must be wiped away. It seems there's simply more of it all: The sweat that goes immediately cold on the disregulated slab of his body. Piss that didn't make it into the toilet bowl. There's blood and vomit--­vomit every day--­and the rotten, volcanic secretions of abscesses. And when I come home from work and he lunges for me, kisses me, all babybaby and half on the nod, and we f*** dreamily, devotedly on the couch, there's spit, and there's come. Sometimes in the trash can I find wadded-­up paper towels or bits of toilet paper he's used to wipe the blood away himself, and sometimes blood-­stained T-­shirts or socks or floral dish towels, which stiffen as they dry as though rigor mortis has set in. I didn't know how to tell my friends, those well-­meaning rays of blond hope, that intention setting was already my life. Intention setting was the blistering fever that came over me when I couldn't reach him and I had to type f*** you f*** you f*** you f*** you f*** you f*** you f*** you over four inches of an email box--­my version of a breathing exercise--­until I could calm down and go back to my work. My drafts folder was full of these ten-­point f*** you blocks, and hundreds of other half-written love letters and hate letters I'd nearly lobbed his way, all intentions to reform or renounce him. Intention setting was what I was doing all those mornings I pulled the car over to cry with my head on the steering wheel, it was the cement resolve I felt harden in my gut when I saw how much money was missing from my bank account. It was the ominous thump of my own helplessness, the rhythm of my days and nights. What I needed was something for intention keeping. Do they make a tincture for that, I wanted to ask, some rose-­petal elixir to heal me? Later that night, I did as my drummer friend said. I stood above my kitchen sink--­swaying slightly, rocking the bourbon baby of my body--­and burned a small strip of printer paper on which I'd written K--­M--­S--­I AM LETTING GO OF YOU in junk-­drawer ballpoint pen. I'd considered I WANT TO LET GO OF YOU--­Write down what you want, she'd said--­but that seemed too aspirational, not present tense enough. No, I don't want to, I am. The paper curled hot orange and tears welled in my eyes as the flame climbed slowly closer to my hand. I wanted it to be Satanic, the dark, measured wildness of casting a spell, untying and setting loose some force in the universe. It felt more like something out of a Taylor Swift video. A pathetic, overearnest micro-­victory against obsessive love while my eyeliner ran. The tiny blaze appeared perfectly controlled. I let the ashes fall into the dirty cereal bowls, narrowing my eyes to summon the sense that this time would be consequential. I really mean it this time: the refrain of sick people the world over. The thing is, you do mean it each time. That night I certainly did. I swallowed the lump in my throat and thought, I am letting go, motherf***er. Starting right now. . . . The disease he has is addiction. It's in the headlines every day, killing more people than ever before, taking over the country. I look at graphs in the newspapers showing steep, almost vertical upticks in overdoses and deaths. I read all the stories--­about the cheap, pure Mexican heroin flooding the market, about school-­age kids left to fend for themselves as their parents descend, then disappear, about small-­town librarians carrying NARCAN to reverse the overdoses happening in their bathrooms, about the cops in a futile, all-­out war to stem the tides of supply and skyrocketing demand. At work, I surreptitiously watch Vice videos about Canadian teenagers panhandling so they can snort crushed-up Smurf-­blue Fentanyl, chasing ever-­shorter highs. They amble around hot parking lots, sending text messages in search of ten more minutes of oblivion, more pills they can crush into the powder they snort off the backs of public toilets. You can see any prospect of future joy receding as their faces slacken and their lids grow heavy. But even the constant reporting on the recent surge in drug horrors--­seen as more horrifying now that the people affected are increasingly whiter and younger--­cannot adequately document its monstrousness. Each time I read one of these stories, watch a film, or look at a graph, I think about all that lies outside the frame, the heartaches those headlines don't show, the creeping messes they won't account for and couldn't possibly contain. They say addiction is a "family disease," and I ponder this a lot, the astonishing rippling outward of bad decisions and risky behaviors--­the impound lots, eviction notices, and pawned heirlooms, lives caught up, just as mine is, in managing everyday grief, accommodating each day a little bit more, more than you ever thought you could handle. Excerpted from Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love by Nina Renata Aron All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Aron explains in the opening chapter of this captivating debut that her memoir seeks to explore the underpinnings of codependency and to launch a conversation about what it means to love an addict. She tells the passionate and heartbreaking story of her on-again, off-again relationship with K, a heroin addict. She unflinchingly describes an existence with K full of broken promises and relapses that was "incompatible with adult life," where she enabled his behavior by providing the support, care, and money needed to feed his addiction. Aron also provides a portrait of her family, including an addicted sister and enabling mother, that helps explain her willingness to remain in a life of destructive codependency. Research related to the psychology of addiction, the gendered nature of codependency, the women involved in the temperance movement, and a brief history of Al-Anon are interwoven with Aron's personal story. These sections inform and enhance the work; however, they would have been much more valuable, especially to researchers, had there been notes providing complete citations for the sourced information. VERDICT Overall, this compelling portrait of addiction, intense love, and codependency should captivate many readers.--Theresa Muraski, Univ. of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Lib.

Publishers Weekly Review

Aron debuts with a disturbing, richly conveyed story of dysfunction and warped love. Aron, who always wanted "to be someone's everything," met K as a teenager; they dated briefly before he dumped her. Aron went on to marry a stable man with whom she had two children; then K resurfaced years later, and the two began an affair. "Obsessive, unhinged love was simply more love," was how she saw it. She left her husband to be with K, whose heroin and alcohol use she both enabled and hoped would stop. Aron spellbindingly details her thirst for mayhem (codependents get "bored and antsy" when there is none) and her fixation on K--who depleted her bank account and was physically abusive--around whom her own drinking escalated. Along the way, she discusses the roles women have historically played as caregivers to troubled men, citing such figures as temperance activist Carrie Nation and Lois Wilson, wife of Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson. Avon's account ends with her leaving K and getting sober. "Love is still my drug," she admits. "The thing I have renounced... is suffering." Aron's dark, gorgeously narrated memoir of destructive codependency will captivate readers. (May)

Booklist Review

In Aron's candid and heart-wrenching memoir, the gnarled knots of love and addiction are untied and tangled and tied again. Aron was fresh out of high school when she first met K, having just moved to San Francisco from New Jersey, where she spent years looking after her heroin-addicted older sister. Looking to make trouble of her own following so much time spent as a pseudo-parent, Aron found K handsome, reckless, and gritty: the perfect amount of danger. They fell fast, but lost touch when Aron had to return home for an emergency sister situation. Several years later, Aron is married with two small children but ready to throw her domestic harmony to the wind to reunite with K. After a cancer scare, prescribed pain medication has left him addicted to harsher and harsher opiates. Their relationship is codependent and all-enveloping, and Aron eventually even starts using with him. She will have to radically unlearn her taught behaviors of love in order to set herself free. Aron revisits old wounds with clarity and care. Her compassion for victims of addiction never wavers, and her presentation of the addicted people in her life is dynamic and fair. A beautiful, nuanced portrait of living alongside addiction.

Kirkus Book Review

An Oakland-based writer and editor tells the story of a passionate but co-dependent long-term affair that ended her marriage and became the "disease" that nearly destroyed her. Aron was a teenager just out of high school when she first met K, a man in his 20s, in San Francisco. Newly arrived from New Jersey, she had come to California to "[collect] experiences" and escape a home life that, though loving, had also become chaotic. Their romance, which K ended, lasted only a few months, but it left her feeling "sick with [a] love" she never forgot. Aron eventually returned to the East Coast to attend college and deal with the fallout surrounding a drug-addicted sister and a mother who could not disconnect from that sister's dramas. She then went to graduate school at Harvard, where she met the "tawny, rangy, beautiful boy" who became her partner. They moved to Berkeley, where they married and had a son. Yet despite her good fortune, the author could not "outrun my own sadness," much of which stemmed from witnessing people she loved struggle with addiction and codependence. Diagnosed with both major depressive disorder and dysthymia, she found herself forced to confront the fact that marriage had transformed "hot, young, carefree love" into a prison. As she desperately attempted to understand and embrace her life, K suddenly reappeared, this time on Facebook, and they began a friendship that quickly developed into an affair. Discovering she was pregnant, Aron tried and ultimately failed to reconcile with her husband. She and K then began a relationship in which she soon found herself not only fighting with him about substance abuse problems, but sometimes partaking in and even funding K's addictions. Interwoven throughout with meditations on desire, caretaking, and the role of early feminists like Carrie Nation in the modern temperance movement, the narrative offers dramatic and compelling insight into Aron's struggles with codependency as it complicates the relationship among femininity, feminism, and enabling. A raw and eloquently unflinching memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Nina Renata Aron is a writer and editor living in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.