Chancers
Addiction, Prison, Recovery, Love: One Couple's Memoir
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4.5 • 8개의 평가
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- US$12.99
출판사 설명
In this powerful memoir of addiction, prison, and recovery, a reporter and a photographer tell their gripping story of falling in love, the heroin habit that drove them apart, and the unlikely way a criminal conviction brought them back together.
Books for a Better Life Award Finalist • LitHub Best Book of the Month
When Susan Stellin asked Graham MacIndoe to shoot her author photo for an upcoming travel book, she barely knew him except for a few weekends with mutual friends at a summer house in Montauk. He was a gregarious, divorced Scotsman who had recently gotten sober; she was an independent New Yorker who decided to take a chance on a rough-around-the-edges guy. But their relationship was soon tested when Susan discovered that Graham still had a drug habit he was hiding.
From their harrowing portrayal of the ravages of addiction to the stunning chain of events that led to Graham’s arrest and imprisonment at Rikers Island, Chancers unfolds in alternating chapters that offer two perspectives on a relationship that ultimately endures against long odds. Susan follows Graham down the rabbit hole of the American criminal justice system, determined to keep him from becoming another casualty of the war on drugs. Graham gives a stark, riveting description of his slide from brownstone Brooklyn to a prison cell, his gut-wrenching efforts to get clean, and his fight to avoid getting exiled far away from his son and the life he built over twenty years.
Beautifully written, brutally honest, yet filled with suspense and hope, Chancers will resonate with anyone who has been touched by the heartache of addiction, the nightmare of incarceration, or the tough choice of leaving or staying with someone who is struggling on the road to recovery. By sharing their story, Susan and Graham show the value of talking about topics many of us are too scared to address.
Praise for Chancers
“Stellin and MacIndoe, in entries sometimes akin to fighters in the ring, tell the story of their lives as MacIndoe rides a roller-coaster life of drug addiction and prison. . . . [Chancers] grabs in a voyeuristic way and propels page-turning to find out what happens next in a saga no soap opera could create.”—The Buffalo News
“Emotionally resonant and evenly structured, their tandem chronicle resists overly romanticizing their bittersweet interactions to focus on the dedication and devotion necessary to make their already-complicated relationship survive the fallout of critical hardships. An emotionally complex and intensely personal binary memoir of addiction and sustainable love.”—Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This unengaging memoir is narrated in turns by Stellin, a freelance writer who is an on-again-off-again girlfriend of and self-described guardian angel to MacIndoe, a photographer addicted to heroin and cocaine. They meet in the swirl of young professional life in New York City. She is not over the moon about him but is willing to date. He obsesses about her at first, but soon enough, when he thinks about her, it is often in the context of how to hide his drug habit. She discovers his addiction early on. She then begins a campaign to save him, encouraging him to go to therapy and bailing him out of prison. Her reasons for doing so are opaque. As one of her friends said to her, "You're being driven for reasons we don't fully understand." MacIndoe's perspective doesn't illuminate the bond between them, unfortunately, for his narrative is consumed with doing drugs, hiding drugs, and life in prison. Stellin plays a bit part amid a cast of people who concern him: his parents and siblings, a jumble of other women. This memoir wants to be a love story but lacks the oomph to achieve it. Instead, what started powerfully eventually meanders, lost, in the pain and confusion of drug addiction.
