Orangutan by Colin Broderick

Orangutan by Colin Broderick

Few people who have been slave to an addiction as vicious, as destructive, and as unrelenting as Colin Broderick's have lived to tell their tale. Fewer still have emerged from the darkest depths of alcoholism--from the perpetual fistfights and muggings, car crashes and blackouts--to tell the harrowing truth about the modern Irish immigrant experience.

Orangutan is the story of a generation of young men and women in search of identity in a foreign land, both in love with and at odds with the country they've made their home. So much more than just another memoir about battling addiction, Orangutan is an odyssey across the unforgiving terrain of 1980s, '90s, and post-9/11 America. Whether he is languishing in the boozy squalor of the Bronx, coke-fueled and manic on the streets of Manhattan, chasing Hunter S. Thompson's American Dream from San Francisco to the desert, or turning the South into his beer-soaked playground, Broderick plainly and unflinchingly charts what it means to be Irish in America, and how the grips of heritage can destroy a man's soul. But brutal though Orangutan may be, it is ultimately a story of hope and redemption. It is the story of an Irish drunk unlike any you've met before.

Colin Broderick, the editor, was born in Northern Ireland and moved to New York at the age of twenty. He also writes scripts (Emerald City, 2018), and his pieces have appeared in The Irish Echo, The Irish Voice, and The New York Times. He is the author of two ground-breaking memoirs: That's That, about his boyhood in Northern Ireland, and Orangutan, about his life in New York after relocating there in 1988.