Naturi Thomas's How to Die in Paris is astonishing. It may look like yet another in the endless parade of "young woman goes to foreign country and finds herself" books trailing in the wake of Eat, Pray, Love, but this is an altogether different type of story--an unflinching tale of self-discovery at life's lowest possible point.
Simply put, Thomas goes to Paris to kill herself. She steps off the train with six euros in her pocket and suicide plans in place: buy poison, take it and die. Instead, she spends three weeks unable to take her life but lost as to how to live it. With no food, no friends and less than a euro left, her miserable Parisian reality is interwoven with memories of her mother, whose mood swings, multiple personalities and grand delusions made Thomas's girlhood magical and terrifying by turns. Thomas's father stood helpless in the face of his wife's tempests; her brother alternated between blank silence and unwavering optimism. A string of failed jobs, a burned-out relationship with a married man, and a mother she cannot talk to without losing her own mind push Thomas to near-fatal despair. Instead, she faces the worst of her demons, learning at long last to forgive--and to love--the abused inner child who has prevented her from reaching so much. In a memoir at once spellbinding and wonderfully honest, Thomas reveals how she died in Paris--and lived. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Literary Cricket
The City of Light illuminates the dark corners of the soul in an astonishingly clear and honest memoir.