Love Is the Drug
A Novel
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Wonderfully empathic, smartly comic, and wickedly insightful, this captivating debut novel maps the progress of an unforgettable young woman endeavoring to mend a broken heart and find salvation.
"Hello, my name is Tyler Tracer and I am falling apart. I am twenty-four years old, and I have no ability whatsoever to choose an occupation or a hair color."
Meet Tyler, the singularly irresistible and straight-talking heroine of Sarahbeth Purcell's touching first novel. An incurable romantic, Tyler's chief obsessions include music, list-making -- and David, the man who broke her heart. Despite an exhaustively detailed list of reasons for why she should just forget about David once and for all -- including (but by no means limited to) chronic illness, terminal self-absorption, and geographical inaccessibility -- Tyler remains hopelessly hooked on him. Hence the wild ride she embarks upon in the wake of her father's death, a ride that takes her from her hometown in Tennessee to sunny Los Angeles, all in hopes of saving David from his ominous take on life.
This hilarious and dark cross-country expedition finds our young heroine negotiating the universally perilous terrain of sex, love, and relationships with uncommon verve, wit, and more than a little recklessness. Along the way, Tyler discovers, among other things, the uniquely redemptive powers of roadkill, the fact that enduring love tends to blossom in the most unexpected and unlikeliest places, and, above all, that nothing can stop her from making her own rules and mapping out her own life. Not even herself.
A joyous triumph of a debut to which readers will respond with a sense of instant recognition, Sarahbeth Purcell's Love Is the Drug spins a story of bold living and loving that crackles with energy and innovation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A masochistic, narcissistic 24-year-old struggles with addiction, the end of a dysfunctional love affair and the failing health of her father in Purcell's rocky debut. Chick-lit conventions a chattering first-person narrator with a troubled love life and a fondness for lists can't quite support a story that begins with a suicide attempt ("I am lying on the side of an abandoned road in the gravel next to the car, with my arm slashed from a broken Pabst beer bottle, and I'm waiting to die"). After that grim prologue, Purcell traces the events leading up to it. Nashville native Tyler Tracer had a beautiful long-distance relationship with David, a middle-aged L.A. musician, but now that they're living together, David treats her horribly. She loves him, and she loves the sex but the pain is killing her. So she splits, arriving back in Tennessee in time to see her beloved father die; distraught, she then embarks on a road trip toward self-actualization. Tyler's voice is raw and desperate and therefore sometimes grating but she's an able narrator, so it's disappointing that Purcell makes Tyler such a "slave to lists," which, in their bullet-pointed brevity, substitute for more graceful characterization ("Top Ten Shitty Occupations I Have Held for More Than Thirty Seconds"; "Top Ten Reasons Why I Let Men Treat Me Like Shit"). Tyler's a passionate girl ("I will write stories until the day I die and live in between the sentences and paragraphs"), but her story feels forced, especially the happily-ever-after part, which comes believe it or not thanks to a kind rock star and a sacrificial armadillo.