The subject of addiction and recovery is so popular in the memoir genre that is has its own subsection of the recovery memoir. What is less charted, and arguably more interesting for it, is the story of the people who love and live with addicts. Codependency is the clinical term for such relationships, the intricate psychology of which Nina Renata Aron makes vividly clear in her brilliant new memoir.
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls grabs you right from its wonderful title and doesn’t let go until it has explained, in searing detail, the circumstances that led a mother of two young children to leave her husband and her financially secure marriage for an addict with whom she had a brief relationship when she was 18.
When we first meet her heroin-addicted partner K, it’s in the carpark of a light-rail station in Oakland, California, where Nina has just given him his allowance of $40 so he can score the three shots that get him through the day. The book unfolds as a kind of mystery – how does a bright graduate from a middle-class Jewish family in suburban New Jersey end up in a situation like this?
As he darts from her car without so much as a thank you and she goes off to earn money to support herself, her children and his habit, the reader will want to know why she stays with him. The book not only answers this question but does so in scenes that surprise right from the beginning of Nina’s story.
On a year out before college, she moves with two friends to San Francisco and meets K, a decade older than her, through her job in Tower Records: "Some people have that kind of magnetism. I could sense a certain current directed toward him, could almost feel writhing within the city the bodies, the energy of many more girls in many other apartments, hoping he would call." The coming-of-age romance is cut short, however, when Nina is recalled to New Jersey to help her parents look after her older sister Lucia, who is herself a heroin addict.
It is the first wake-up call to the reader: drug addiction can strike as easily in picket fence New Jersey as it can in the faded hippie enclaves of San Francisco.
Stories and research
Structurally, the book goes back and forth between Nina’s present life with K and various seminal moments in the past: saving Lucia, her time as a doctorate student, her marriage at a young age to a tech graduate, the arrival of her two children and bouts of postnatal depression, her reintroduction to K and the affair that continues despite the pregnancy of her second child.
Complementing the personal narrative is the academic research that Renata Aron includes on the temperance movement in the US, the establishment of AA, and subsequently Al-Anon, the meetings for family members of addicts. The book's title references Carrie Nation, founder of the temperance movement, who used to address bartenders she encountered with this pithy, memorable greeting. Years later, we're told, some bars in the US still have signs saying: All nations welcome, except Carrie.
These interludes are well chosen and interesting, particularly the passages from wives of alcoholics who are sick of being seen as enablers, or as adjuncts to their problematic husbands rather than as people in their own right.
“To the extent that it is understood at all,” Renata Aron writes, “codependency is thought to be the province of crazy girlfriends, overbearing mothers, and pathetic wives. In popular culture, women’s obsessive, controlling, or enabling behaviours are represented as assorted forms of weakness or madness.” In Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls, she reclaims the narrative for herself, but also for the generations of codependents before her.
The author currently lives in California, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Republic and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is a deft writer whose memoir reads like fiction – colourful details, elliptical dialogue, twists and turns, the relentless needs of the characters. Jen Beagin’s superb debut novel Pretend I’m Dead bears comparison, with both books telling the story of a woman whose life gets side-lined by other people’s addictions.
Renata Aron is brutally self-aware, on her own lapses into addiction (“If you hang around the barber shop long enough,” her mother tells her, “you’re gonna get a haircut”) and on the decision to move in with an addict when she has a two-year-old and a two-month-old to look after: “I was insane, in other words.”
But in telling the story of a codependent, her other great success is to humanise the addict. By the end of the book, her decision does not seem insane, just another sad fact of a relationship doomed to fail.
