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A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love
by Nina Renata Aron
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.
"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.
"A disturbing, richly conveyed story of dysfunction and warped love ... Aron's dark, gorgeously narrated memoir of destructive codependency will captivate readers." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In Aron's candid and heart-wrenching memoir, the gnarled knots of love and addiction are untied and tangled and tied again... . Her compassion for victims of addiction never wavers, and her presentation of the addicted people in her life is dynamic and fair. A beautiful, nuanced portrait of living alongside addiction." —Booklist (starred review)
"A master class in memoir." —Shelf Awareness
"What a marvel this book is, that such a harrowing subject can be rendered with such tenderness. Any person who has ever put herself in harm's way for love will see herself in these pages." —Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes
"Balancing extensive research with dazzling, affecting prose, Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls is both a whip-smart addition to the literature of addiction and an intimate look at the beating heart of codependency. I couldn't put it down." —Kimberly King Parsons, author of the National Book Award–nominated Black Light
This information about Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nina Renata Aron is a writer and editor living in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
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