Double Double

April 15, 2013
With its title taken from a line spoken by the three witches in Macbeth, this prickly, wildly uneven memoir is ostensibly about years of excessive drinking by the celebrated mystery author and her son. In alternate sections, the mother-son team describe their respective struggles with alcohol. Yet while Martha’s segments reveal a truly thoughtful artist wrestling with the internal, nearly metaphysical contradictions posed by drinking, her son, Ken—who attended his mother’s alma mater, the University of Iowa, and then hooked into PR jobs in publishing—comes off as arrogant and entitled, drinking and smoking to anesthetize the sense that he “never had enough.” Ken attended a 12-step AA program by his mid-20s, while mother Martha preferred detox at the Kolmac Clinic, among others. They have been clean for at least a few decades and their memories of the big peaks and troughs on alcohol are a little hazy. Ken’s sections are grounded in ham-fisted blowouts in bars and football games; while Martha’s are subtly calibrated depictions that suggest she will never be as seduced as she had been by the bottle. In the end, mother Martha simply asks why her son went “looking for safety in booze.” Despite several “conversations” that bring the two voices together, the metaphysical and the logistical 12-step are grating in this ill-focused work.

February 15, 2013

Mystery Writers of America grandmaster Grimes and her son, who works in public relations, here join forces on a dual memoir about their struggles with alcoholism. As they consider drinking, recovery, relapse, success, and failure, they highlight how individual the struggle is; each person combats his or her demons in a specific way

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2013
Fans of best-selling mystery writer Martha Grimes might be shocked to learn that she was a habitual and self-destructive alcoholic for almost 30 years, before seeking help in 1990. Her son, Ken, was also a drinker, beginning at the age of 13 and continuing for more than a decade, until (also in 1990) he, too, began pulling himself out of his addiction. This collaborative memoir, written in mostly alternating chapters, recounts their lives before, during, and after their addictions. Although they are telling very similar stories, there are many differences in the way the authors see their former selves; even their approaches to healing were different (Martha entered a rehab clinic, while Ken did a 12-step program). But one similarity permeates the book: these are two strong, self-aware people who fell into their addictions by accident and were unaware of their growing reliance on alcohol until it was nearly too late to stop, and then each of them found the strength to reverse the pattern. This deserves shelf space alongside other literary alcoholism memoirs including Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life (1994) and Augusten Burroughs' Dry (2003).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)