Beachglass
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
When Delia entered treatment for drug and alcohol addiction at age seventeen, her life changed completely: she immersed herself in AA, began to heal old family wounds, and developed a whole new outlook on herself, on spirituality, on relationships. Out of the rubble, she built a life for herself that any recovering woman would be proud of: a loving husband, a beautiful daughter, her own brand of hard-won wisdom.
But her long-term sobriety is put to the test when she receives a phone call from her gay best friend, Timothy. Fulfilling a pact they made a decade prior, Delia tears herself away from her new life in Seattle and rushes home to Los Angeles, to Timothy's bedside, facing the one thing she fears her sobriety cannot survive—losing him.
Back in LA, Delia begins to encounter familiar people, places, and temptations…a barrage of memories that makes her stop and sort through her past, looking for the courage she knows she needs now more than ever. As her past catches up with her present, she sees that she has not merely survived her losses and mistakes, but has been made stronger because of them. This understanding comes to her in full as she holds a piece of beachglass in her hand and realizes that it is its scuffs and scrapes that give it its quiet splendor, its imperfections that give it its beauty and individuality, and that it is from being tossed and tumbled that it no longer shatters—and she knows the same goes for her too.
Set against a backdrop of West Hollywood in the late 1980s, populated by a drag queen and a stripper, beautiful boys and artists, and told by a narrator with equal doses of self-deprecating humor, old-soul awareness, fallibility, and brutal honesty, Beachglass is a gritty and uplifting story of recovery, a journey that presents a fresh look into the world of AA and offers a convincing rendering of the constant struggle to go into recovery and stay there—no matter what. In this stunning debut novel, Wendy Blackburn writes of the transformative power of love—for others and oneself—and about friendship, about forgiveness, about redemption.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For her debut novel, Blackburn, a chemical dependency counselor in Seattle, presents a kaleidoscopic look at AA denizens, clean and not, from the perspective of a Seattle chemical dependency counselor who is a recovering addict. Delia, 10 years clean and sober, leaves her husband, Simon, and toddler, Clara, to return to her childhood home in West Hollywood at the behest of Timothy, with whom she went through AA and who is dying of AIDS. What unfolds is Delia's retrospective account of her addiction and her arduous and still-constant struggle to find a way to live clean. The book is populated with a cast of characters flawed in almost every conceivable way, including Delia's disturbed parents; her late sponsor, Joan; and others from AA days, some of whom are still a mess. Delia's remembrances of meetings and other charged parts of her past make up the bulk of the book, and are raw and painful. With Delia's recovery and Timothy's deaths foregone conclusions, there's not much to the plot, and Delia's first person is as generic as it is colloquial, but her courage and her past ravagement are palpable.
