Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Dec 2009
304 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
His freshman year of college, Alex Lemon was supposed to be the star catcher on the Macalester College baseball team. He was the boy getting every girl, the hard-partying kid who everyone called Happy, often without even knowing his real name. In the spring of 1997, he had his first stroke.
For two years Lemon coped with his deteriorating health by sinking deeper into alcohol and drug abuse. His charming and carefree exterior masked his self-destructive and sometimes cruel behavior as he endured two more brain bleeds and a crippling depression. After undergoing brain surgery, he is nursed back to health by his free-spirited artist mother, who once again teaches him to stand on his own.
Alive with unexpected humor and sensuality, Happy is a hypnotic self-portrait of a young man confronting the wreckage of his own body; it is also the deeply moving story of a mother's redemptive and healing powers. Alex Lemon's Technicolor sentences pop and sing as he writes about survival -- of the body and of the human spirit.
"[A] voltaic narrative that is alternately horrifying and touching." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Lemon turns out strange and beautiful metaphors, and his dialog perfectly conjures the hip-hop inflected speech of white suburban kids on their liberal arts idyll. For anyone who loves a great story, period." - Library Journal
"Empathetic, vividly rendered and impossible to put down." - Kirkus Reviews
"Alex Lemon takes his reader inside the terror and strangeness of illness -- and gives us, along the way, a loving portrait of a devoted, wonderfully nutty mother. Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity." - Mark Doty, author of Dog Years and Fire to Fire
This information about Happy 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.
Alex Lemon was born in Iowa, and lives in Ft. Worth, Texas. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Mosquito and Hallelujah Blackout, and is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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