Has given us language to feel the depth and devastations of love, to pay respect to the gnarled and beautiful ways we grow. -- Chanel Miller, author * Know My Name *
Nina Renata Aron's prose is masterful and her piercing insight into her own story makes this a sharp-edged and dazzling read. ... a remarkable achievement. -- Carvell Wallace
A bleak, brutal and brilliant account of the devastation addiction can wreak on a relationship * i Paper *
This book is an essential read. It shows us that addicts are more than statistics, their co-dependents more than snivelling, whimpering, and brokenhearted. These are real people, rendered by Aron with eye-opening complexity and dynamism. In this book, the underrepresented & overlooked world of the codependent emerges from the bargain basement of self-help and shopworn homilies into the realm of love and loathing, birth and death, blood and urine. Into the realm, in other words, of the literary. -- Rebekah Frumkin * Washington Post *
From the title to the final sentence, a wildly imaginative, feminine and feminist book with a palpable energetic power that feels as much incantation as memoir. -- Emma Forrest, author * Your Voice in My Head *
What a marvel this book is, that such a harrowing subject can be rendered with such tenderness. ... I have no doubt that this will be one of the best books of 2020. -- Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes
At turns wild and punk rock, redemptive and heartfelt, I couldn't put it down. -- Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot
A whip-smart addition to the literature of addiction and an intimate look at the beating heart of codependency. It's a propulsive story of empathy, desire, recklessness, and the things we risk for love-I couldn't put it down. -- Kimberly King Parsons, author * Black Light *
Aron's dark, gorgeously narrated memoir of destructive codependency will captivate readers. * Publishers Weekly *
[A] scorching, unvarnished memoir * Entertainment Weekly *
In Aron's candid and heart-wrenching memoir, the gnarled knots of love and addiction are untied and tangled and tied again. ... A beautiful, nuanced portrait of living alongside addiction. * Booklist (starred review) *
No matter what your relationship to addictive behavior might be, Aron offers a fresh and sometimes shocking perspective that has been sidelined since the beginning of the recovery movement. ... Whether she's describing her mental state...or the landscape of addiction ..., each page of Aron's memoir glints with hard-won truths. * LA Times *
'Incredible ... This is also a deeply feminist book that highlights the patriarchal structures that keep women in such damaging relationships. If this all sounds heavy - it is - but it's so well written and loving that once you pick it up, you'll read it in a couple of sittings.' * Stylist *
Deeply personal and deeply researched -- Lydia Kiesling, author * The Golden State *
Aron's debut memoir unfurls her evocative story of falling in love with and upending her life over a man addicted to heroin. A searing sociohistorical excavation of codependency. * O: The Oprah Magazine *
A master class in memoir. * Shelf Awareness *
