So Many Books, So Little Time
Things have not been good here.
Last night, Leo and I had a terrible Fight, the kind of Fight we don't have too often anymore, I won't tell you the details, but it started over something very minor and escalated fast. Words were used, by me and more loudly by him, the kind of words that Charley gets a quarter for every time we speak them, which thankfully doesn't include this time because he was already asleep.
After he screamed at me for a couple of minutes that of course seemed much longer, I went down to my office and I cried and I called a friend and complained and I whined because she's a good Friend and because she has heard all of this before, she didn't give me Advice, she just listened.
I was so keyed up and exhausted and mad and sad I didnb0t think I was going to be able to do anything but talk and cry but somehow after she and I hung up the phone I managed to pick up the book I'd been reading which was A Million Little Pieces, about a twenty-three-year-old-guy who wakes up on a plane without any idea how he got there. He has four missing teeth and a hole in his cheek and he's pouring blood from every orifice and during every bodily function and he doesn't know who put him there or where he's going but it turns out he is going to a rehab center in Minnesota and his book is a stream-of-consciousness store of the time he spent there and the struggle he goes through to first decide whether he wants to get better and see his twenty-fourth birthday or whether he would rather just let what he calls the Fury take over him. The Fury is the little voice inside him, he says, that turns into a roar and tells him to drink and smoke crack and turn violent. The Fury has been with him all his life, but as he goes through rehab he insists on not being a victim and not buying into all that twelve-step, addiction-is-a-disease bullshit and he insists to his Parents who are nice upper-middle-class people who love him but have never known how to deal with him and to the Counselors at the Hospital that he is going to get straight without all of that traditional crap in other words on his own terms. And apparently he manages it because at the end of this book is when he tells you what happened to all the people he met there including the young crack-addicted whore he was in love with he also tells you that he has not relapsed and it has beern almost ten years. It is an amazing Book that is written in this run-on style with weird Capitalizations and Punctuation that is annoying at first but which you sort of forget about after a while but which I suddenly appreciate is hard to pull off.
[...]
But the real value in A Million Little Pieces is that it explores and illustrates what it's like to struggle with a demon, and demon, whether it's drugs or anger or greed or food or something else for some reason is a powerful force in your life. And that gives me pause. And patience.
At the very least, last night it gave me the nerve to turn out the light and go back upstairs, where, I had a pretty good idea, based on recent past experience, Leo would be sitting in the living room, spent by Anger. And we sat and we talked and by the time the sun came up, we decided, yet again, to pick up the million little pieces of our marriage and try to put them back together, one piece and one day at a time.
I can't remember where I heard about So Many Books, So Little Time by Sara Nelson. I bought it on a whim and it sat on my shelves for weeks. Last weekend, I picked it up just to see if I was going to like it. I remembered reading somewhere else that it wasn't so good so I worried I wouldn't like it. It turned out to be quite a fast and enjoyable read and I got some good book ideas out of it as well. I still think it has an exceptionally bad cover. |
