Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English

GOOD MORNING, DESTROYER OF MEN'S SOULS

Nina Renata Aron

A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love

A scorching memoir of a love affair with an addict, weaving personal reckoning with psychology and history to understand the nature of addiction, codependency, and our appetite for obsessive love.

"The disease he has is addiction," Nina Renata Aron writes of her boyfriend, K. "The disease I have is loving him." Their love affair was dramatic, urgent, overwhelming--an intoxicating antidote to the long, lonely days of early motherhood. But soon after they get together, K starts using again, and years of relapses and broken promises follow. Even as his addiction deepens, she stays, convinced she is the one who can get him sober. If she leaves him, has she failed? After an adolescence marred by family trauma and addiction, Nina can't help but feel responsible for those suffering around her. How can she break this pattern? Written in prose at once unflinching and acrobatic, Aron delivers a piercing memoir of romance and addiction, drawing on intimate anecdote as well as academic research to crack open the long-feminized and overlooked phenomenon of codependency. She shifts between visceral, ferocious accounts of her affair with K and introspective analysis of the part she plays in his addictions, as well as defining moments in the history of codependency, from temperance to the formation of Al-Anon to more recent research in the psychology of addiction. Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls is a blazing, big-hearted book, one that illuminates and adds nuance to the messy tethers between femininity, enabling, and love.

Nina Renata Aron is a writer and editor living in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Available products
Book Published 2020-05-01 by Crown

Comments

I was riveted by Nina Renata Aron's incandescent memoir from the first page to the last. What a marvel this book is, that such a harrowing subject can be rendered with such tenderness. Any person who has ever put herself in harm's way for love will see herself in these pages. 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

"Aron's dark, gorgeously narrated memoir of destructive codependency will captivate readers." (starred review) Read more...

World Spanish: Oceano; UK: Profile Books;

Brilliant, intimate, vital. I was emptied and healed by this book. I was nodding along as I became a little less lost, a little more known. I didn't dog-ear pages, I bent them in half, to return to again and again in this lifetime. Nina Renata Aron 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, New York Times bestselling author of Know My Name Aron is a truth-telling badass with an irresistible voice. Balancing extensive research with dazzling, affecting prose, Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls is both a whip-smart addition to the literature of addiction and an intimate look at the beating heart of co-dependency. 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 of the National Book Awardnominated Black Light Aron has expertly examined and reframed the traditional patriarchal structure of recovery literature, incorporating her own raw and gorgeously rendered story. Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls is for anyone touched by addiction, which is all of us. It is a stunning interrogation of family and love and what it means to lose yourself in another. At turns wild and punk rock, redemptive and heartfelt, this book feels like the book I've always been looking for. Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot Aron's prose is masterful and her piercing insight into her own story makes this a sharp-edged and dazzling read. Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls is a remarkable achievement. Carvell Wallace, a New York Times bestselling author, memoirist, and award-winning podcaster