My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

February 16, 2015
The follow-up to his first book, the Nation Book Award Finalist The Boy Kings of Texas, this work finds Martinez again mining his personal and family life for narrative gold. This time, instead of focusing on his border childhood he turns his attention to his adult life in Seattle, most notably his younger brother Derek's near fatal drunken fall and his ex-fiancé's harrowing car accident that act as catalysts for an exploration of his own personal traumasâincluding his alcoholic tendencies and near-suicidal depression. Though Martinez's mischievous nature can still illicit a smile, the self-deprecating humor of the first book has mostly been replaced with self-loathing as the author continually realizes he is unable to help his loved ones because he more often than not refuses to help himself. However, the fact that he knows his issues and is able talk about them in such intricate prose ("My heart was a drunken compass even then, before I was a drunk.") allows this work to remain compelling despite the author's inability to change. As Martinez rides a rollercoaster of relapse and redemption, those who survive Martinez's self-inflicted wounds and hang on till the end are rewarded with a conclusion that's unlikely as it is uplifting.

October 15, 2014
A best-selling memoirist tells the story of how he survived-and came to terms with-the traumatic near-deaths of his youngest brother and former fiancee.Martinez's (The Boy Kings of Texas, 2012) youngest brother, Derek, was born to parents whose marriage was "crippled by rot." Spoiled with attention as a child, Derek hero-worshipped his hard-living, hard-drinking older brother. But he also suffered deeply when his parents divorced and the mother he adored shunted him off to live with one relative after another. So when Martinez, who went to live in Seattle, learned that his brother was in a coma as a result of an alcohol-related blackout and fall, he felt profound guilt. His misery was compounded by the fact he chose not to return to Texas due to a feud with another brother. But Martinez could not escape his own conscience and found himself "collecting little brothers" in his neighborhood. Then he met Stephanie, a troubled bisexual woman whose "anguish...brokenness...and misfit qualit[ies]" mirrored his own. The pair hurried into a dysfunctional engagement. At the same time, Martinez befriended an older woman named Sarah, with whom he fell deeply in love. The author eventually broke off his relationship with Stephanie, but not long afterward, she drove her car off a cliff. Like Derek, she suffered brain injury, went into a coma and survived; unlike him, she had the shocked and bewildered Martinez by her side until she recovered. At Sarah's insistence, Martinez began to write because "it was going to be [his] only way out" and the way he could finally align the "drunken compass" of his broken heart. This tragicomic memoir is not just about the complications of family, but also about the power of narrative to heal and make whole. A passionate, occasionally convoluted account of personal redemption.

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November 15, 2014
The author of The Boy Kings of Texas (2012) returns with another deeply personal and moving memoir. It begins with two late-night phone calls, several years apart. In one, in March 2007, he learns that his brother has sustained a head injury after a fall; the other, in December 2009, tells him that his ex-fianc'e has driven her car over the side of an overpass. In writing about this traumatic period in his life, Martinez talks candidly and painfully about his own mental collapse, his alcoholism and drug use, and his slow path to recovery. It's not what you might call an entertaining memoirif anything it's almost operatically tragicbut Martinez writes so frankly, so eloquently, that we are compelled to keep reading, if for no other reason than to see if this poor guy finds a way to come out the other side of all he's gone through. He does, but it is a hard-won breakthrough.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)