K is a monster. He is also a savior, a spark amid author Nina Renata Aron's otherwise cold days of drudgery and postpartum depression after the birth of her children. And he is an addict, hooked on seemingly every incarnation of drugs from heroin to methadone--a man who, ever since a cancer diagnosis derailed his life, seems to care only about the next fix. Yet even as he repeatedly abuses Aron, both figuratively and literally, throughout her shattering memoir, Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls, readers will understand why she is hooked on him, too. She wants to save him. She wants to be capable of saving. Even the way she writes about him is tender, mothering: she will refer to her boyfriend only as "K," never a full name.
Aron plumbs her memories, which are as raw and visceral as movie stills, to understand how her codependent personality developed throughout adolescence. She frequently draws on psychological research and fishes for meaning in materials from Al-Anon, meeting groups for those affected by a friend or family member's addiction. She lays out her childhood years, during which she became parentified while caring for her heroin-addicted eldest sister. And she sifts through the debris of her marriage, which she blew apart while having an affair with K. Throughout the book, Aron is ruthless with herself, both self-deprecating and self-punishing, and yet she always comes back to her story's central theme: learning how to love--and how to love yourself--is a practice. You have to work at it.
Hers is an exquisite though demanding story, one so brutally honest it transforms into something beautiful. A master class in memoir. --Lauren Puckett, freelance writer