Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

Starred review from February 24, 2020
Aron debuts with a disturbing, richly conveyed story of dysfunction and warped love. Aron, who always wanted “to be someone’s everything,” met K as a teenager; they dated briefly before he dumped her. Aron went on to marry a stable man with whom she had two children; then K resurfaced years later, and the two began an affair. “Obsessive, unhinged love was simply more love,” was how she saw it. She left her husband to be with K, whose heroin and alcohol use she both enabled and hoped would stop. Aron spellbindingly details her thirst for mayhem (codependents get “bored and antsy” when there is none) and her fixation on K—who depleted her bank account and was physically abusive—around whom her own drinking escalated. Along the way, she discusses the roles women have historically played as caregivers to troubled men, citing such figures as temperance activist Carrie Nation and Lois Wilson, wife of Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson. Avon’s account ends with her leaving K and getting sober. “Love is still my drug,” she admits. “The thing I have renounced... is suffering.” Aron’s dark, gorgeously narrated memoir of destructive codependency will captivate readers.

March 15, 2020
An Oakland-based writer and editor tells the story of a passionate but co-dependent long-term affair that ended her marriage and became the "disease" that nearly destroyed her. Aron was a teenager just out of high school when she first met K, a man in his 20s, in San Francisco. Newly arrived from New Jersey, she had come to California to "[collect] experiences" and escape a home life that, though loving, had also become chaotic. Their romance, which K ended, lasted only a few months, but it left her feeling "sick with [a] love" she never forgot. Aron eventually returned to the East Coast to attend college and deal with the fallout surrounding a drug-addicted sister and a mother who could not disconnect from that sister's dramas. She then went to graduate school at Harvard, where she met the "tawny, rangy, beautiful boy" who became her partner. They moved to Berkeley, where they married and had a son. Yet despite her good fortune, the author could not "outrun my own sadness," much of which stemmed from witnessing people she loved struggle with addiction and codependence. Diagnosed with both major depressive disorder and dysthymia, she found herself forced to confront the fact that marriage had transformed "hot, young, carefree love" into a prison. As she desperately attempted to understand and embrace her life, K suddenly reappeared, this time on Facebook, and they began a friendship that quickly developed into an affair. Discovering she was pregnant, Aron tried and ultimately failed to reconcile with her husband. She and K then began a relationship in which she soon found herself not only fighting with him about substance abuse problems, but sometimes partaking in and even funding K's addictions. Interwoven throughout with meditations on desire, caretaking, and the role of early feminists like Carrie Nation in the modern temperance movement, the narrative offers dramatic and compelling insight into Aron's struggles with codependency as it complicates the relationship among femininity, feminism, and enabling. A raw and eloquently unflinching memoir.

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May 1, 2020

Aron explains in the opening chapter of this captivating debut that her memoir seeks to explore the underpinnings of codependency and to launch a conversation about what it means to love an addict. She tells the passionate and heartbreaking story of her on-again, off-again relationship with K, a heroin addict. She unflinchingly describes an existence with K full of broken promises and relapses that was "incompatible with adult life," where she enabled his behavior by providing the support, care, and money needed to feed his addiction. Aron also provides a portrait of her family, including an addicted sister and enabling mother, that helps explain her willingness to remain in a life of destructive codependency. Research related to the psychology of addiction, the gendered nature of codependency, the women involved in the temperance movement, and a brief history of Al-Anon are interwoven with Aron's personal story. These sections inform and enhance the work; however, they would have been much more valuable, especially to researchers, had there been notes providing complete citations for the sourced information. VERDICT Overall, this compelling portrait of addiction, intense love, and codependency should captivate many readers.--Theresa Muraski, Univ. of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Lib.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2020
In Aron's candid and heart-wrenching memoir, the gnarled knots of love and addiction are untied and tangled and tied again. Aron was fresh out of high school when she first met K, having just moved to San Francisco from New Jersey, where she spent years looking after her heroin-addicted older sister. Looking to make trouble of her own following so much time spent as a pseudo-parent, Aron found K handsome, reckless, and gritty: the perfect amount of danger. They fell fast, but lost touch when Aron had to return home for an emergency sister situation. Several years later, Aron is married with two small children but ready to throw her domestic harmony to the wind to reunite with K. After a cancer scare, prescribed pain medication has left him addicted to harsher and harsher opiates. Their relationship is codependent and all-enveloping, and Aron eventually even starts using with him. She will have to radically unlearn her taught behaviors of love in order to set herself free. Aron revisits old wounds with clarity and care. Her compassion for victims of addiction never wavers, and her presentation of the addicted people in her life is dynamic and fair. A beautiful, nuanced portrait of living alongside addiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)