Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls
A memoir about women, addiction and love
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
'The disease he has is addiction,' Nina Renata Aron writes of her boyfriend. 'The disease I have is loving him.' Their affair is dramatic, urgent - an intoxicating antidote to the lonely days of early motherhood. But soon, K starts using again. Even as his addiction deepens, she stays, thinking she can save him. It's a familiar pattern, developed in an adolescence marred by family trauma - how can she break it? If she leaves, has she failed?
In this unflinching memoir, Aron shows the devastating effect of addiction on loved ones. She also untangles the messy ties between her own history of enabling, society's expectations of womanhood and our ideas of love. She cracks open the feminised phenomenon of co-dependency, tracing its development from the formation of Al-Anon to recent research in the psychology of addiction, and asks uncomfortable questions about when help becomes harm, and when we choose to leave.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
