Gone to the Crazies
A Memoir
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4.8 • 6 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
As a child, Alison Weaver's life shone with surface-level perfection—full of nannies, private schools, and ballet lessons. She had all the luxuries of a wealthy Manhattan upbringing, and all the makings of a perfect Upper East Side miss. But her childhood memories were laced with darker undertones: Her father was emotionally absent, unable to engage in problems that couldn't be solved with clean lines and simple plans, and her mother was a beautiful, aloof alcoholic. Neither parent approved of their daughter's outbursts and emotions—and in the midst of her parents' own flaws, Weaver was constantly reminded that she was a mess that needed fixing.
By the time she was a teenager, Weaver had found escape in alcohol, marijuana, and late-night abandon. But when her exasperated parents had her shipped away—in handcuffs—to the cultish Cascade School, everything changed. Within the surreal isolation of the school's mountain campus, she left her old self behind, warping into a brainwashed model of Cascade's mottos and ideals. Graduation two years later left her unprepared for the harshness of the real world—and she soon fell back into a mind-numbing wash of drugs. Stum-bling into freefall in New York's East Village in the 1990s, Weaver's life began a downward spiral marked by needles and late-night parties, mingled with fears of HIV and death. Ultimately, faced with the reality of her rapidly escalating self-destruction, Weaver was forced to face her inner darkness head on.
Gone to the Crazies proves the age-old adage: You can't come clean until you've hit rock bottom. By turns wry, heartbreaking, and emotionally intense, Alison Weaver's mesmerizing debut fascinates with its vivid depiction of the bonds between family and friends, and the thoughtful exploration of what it means to fight for identity and equilibrium.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
To be fair, Weaver's entry into the family dysfunction/drug abuse/road to recovery memoir pool is engaging on a voyeuristic level; unfortunately, insanity and addiction have been staples of the genre since The Bell Jar, and Weaver's doesn't contribute much to the tradition. Beginning with her privileged New York-Connecticut upbringing, Weaver gives her girlhood self a hard-to-swallow existentialist streak, as in her description of a Fifth Avenue Christmas party: "The nothingness of it all hit me as I stood alone in the corner... like a painting covered in too much varnish, the top layer began to peel away, and in a flash I saw the dark and frightening emptiness that lay below the color." Faced with all that emptiness, wealth and domestic instability (alcoholic mother, distant father), Weaver drinks, smokes pot and gets kicked out of prestigious Spence School. Eventually she ends up at $100,000-a-year rehab boarding school Cascade, which turns out to be more cult than cure. After graduation, Weaver resorts to old tricks, drugging and slumming through New York's Lower East Side, discovering Ketamine and getting arrested on the road to redemption. Though there's plenty of honesty here, and an interesting look inside the bizarre world of high-end juvenile rehab, too much of the action and self-reflection are both familiar and overwrought.
Customer Reviews
Walk Down Memory Lane
I graduated from the Cascade School as well. This book brought me back to the core of the school, good and bad, and has allowed my family to better understand what I went through during the two year program. Allison, like so many other Cascade alumni, is extremely talented, and has given us graduates a way to share with family and friends, our experiences there, in a way that we might not have otherwise been able to. Thanks Allison!!!
Accurate!! Thank you for writing this.
Bought this book because I went to the same boarding school. Fun to laugh and cry with Alison as my memory was jogged! Well written. So many talented kids at this school. So many powerful memories and messages. Bravo to her for muddling thru them all and putting them out there. Great job.