Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls
A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love
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4.3 • 16 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A scorching memoir of a love affair with an addict, weaving personal reckoning with psychology and history to understand the nature of addiction, codependency, and our appetite for obsessive love
“Ferocious . . . glints with hard-won truths . . . Aron lights a path through the darkness of her past toward a better future.”—Los Angeles Times
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PARADE
“The disease he has is addiction,” Nina Renata Aron writes of her boyfriend, K. “The disease I have is loving him.” Their love affair is dramatic, urgent, overwhelming—an intoxicating antidote to the long, lonely days of early motherhood. Soon after they get together, K starts using again, and years of relapses and broken promises follow. Even as his addiction deepens, she stays, convinced she is the one who can get him sober. After an adolescence marred by family trauma and addiction, Nina can’t help but feel responsible for those suffering around her. How can she break this pattern? If she leaves K, has she failed him?
Writing in prose at once unflinching and acrobatic, Aron delivers a piercing memoir of romance and addiction, drawing on intimate anecdotes as well as academic research to crack open the long-feminized and overlooked phenomenon of codependency. She shifts between visceral, ferocious accounts of her affair with K and introspective analyses of the part she plays in his addictions, as well as defining moments in the history of codependency, from the temperance movement to the formation of Al-Anon to more recent research in the psychology of addiction. Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls is a blazing, bighearted book that illuminates and adds nuance to the messy tethers between femininity, enabling, and love.
Praise for Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls
“Unflinching . . . Aron writes in gripping prose about the thrills and dangers of her own substance use and relationship with K—their weak-kneed passion and wolfish needs, as well as her guilt-ridden enabling and savior-complex optimism.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“In Nina Renata Aron’s scorching, unvarnished memoir, an addiction story gets spun from the perspective of the helpless partner, the lover too stuck in a dangerous dynamic to find her way out.”—Entertainment Weekly
“A raw and eloquently unflinching memoir.”—Kirkus Reviews
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Nina Renata Aron’s memoir is an unflinching, heartrending journey through substance abuse, codependency, and love. Aron never imagined that she’d leave her husband, the father of her two young children. But when her first love, the charismatic heroin addict K, waltzes back into her life, her flawed but comfortable marriage is overwhelmed by a passionate, all-consuming affair that slowly descends into drug-fueled chaos. Chronicling the jarring details of this toxic relationship while drawing parallels to her birth family’s own history of drug and alcohol abuse, Aron combines deeply personal stories with historical facts and psychological theory. The result is a robust analysis of codependency and its seemingly inescapable cycle through a feminist lens. Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls—a phrase temperance activist Carrie Nation used to say to bartenders before destroying their saloons with a hatchet—is an astute exploration of why people struggle to escape an addict’s gravitational pull.
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.
