Enjoying the first chapter, “Gotchernose,” in Don’t Go Crazy Without Me (Red Hen Press) by Deborah A. Lott:
“‘Gotchernose,’ he’d say. Then he’d sweep his hand back across my face and reveal his empty palm to suggest no harm done! and put my nose back on. Roy’s trick said that even the most dire loss could be reversed. You could make time go backward….”
Lott’s Don’t Go Crazy Without Me is an intimate coming of age story, complex and warm in spite of the isolations its subjects experience. Ira, the father, has a mesmeric quality that often draws and sometimes frightens the reader, as it does Lott the young girl, a combination that is hard to put down and one that the early chapters foreshadow to be a dire end. Lott offers a salve early in the memoir, “Even the most dire loss could be reversed. You could make time go backward…,” offering her readers a reprieve not only to her experiences as a girl, but also, it seems, for the world at large. READ NOW
About Don’t Go Crazy Without Me
“Funny, horrifying, and heartbreaking—and often surprisingly, all three at once. It’s an astonsihly vivid book, and to read it is to be caught up, just as the writer was, ina an impossible, crazy misfit familly. Thought face and nerve and will, Deborah learn that you can’t ‘screw nature,’ or ‘stop time,’ as her father tried to do, ‘but ou could turn your grief into love.’ This writer’s love for her deeply screwed-up family is unforgettable. As the bet memoirs do, Don’t Go Crazy Without Me makes this writer’s story belong to all of us.” —Mark Doty, National Book Award Winner
Don’t Go Crazy Without Me tells the tragicomic coming of age story of a girl who grew up under the seductive sway of her outrageously eccentric father. He taught her how to have fun; he also taught her to fear food poisoning, other children’s infectious diseases, and the contaminating propensities of the world at large. Alienated from her emotionally distant mother, the girl bonded closely with her father and his worldview. When he plunged from neurotic to full-blown psychotic, she nearly followed him. Sanity is not always a choice, but for the sixteen-year-old, decisions had to be made and lines drawn between reality and what her mother called her “overactive imagination.” She would have to give up beliefs carried by the infectious agent of her father’s love.
Saving herself would require an unconventional reading of Moby Dick, sexual pleasure in the body that had confounded her, and entry into the larger world of political activism as a volunteer in Robert F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign. After attending his last stop at the Ambassador Hotel the night of his assassination, she would come to a new reckoning with loss and with engagement beyond the confines of her family. Ultimately, she would find a way to turn her grief into love. READ MORE
About Deborah A. Lott
Deborah A. Lott is a writer, editor, and college instructor. Her creative nonfiction has been published widely. Her work has been thrice named as Notable Essays of the Year in Best American Essays, and thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Her book, Don’t Go Crazy Without Me has been acclaimed by writers Mark Doty, Abigail Thomas, Paul Lisicky, Karen E. Bender, Hope Edelman, among others. She is also the author of the book In Session: the Bond between Women and Their Therapists, which was widely praised for its unprecedented look at boundary and transference dilemmas in psychotherapy. Lott surveyed and interviewed several hundred women in gathering the research for that work. The book continues to be used to train psychotherapists nationwide and appears on multiple consumer websites as one of the top books ever written about the psychotherapy relationship.
Lott serves as a faculty member at Antioch University, Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing and literature courses, and serves as Editor to Two Hawks Quarterly. Among other courses, she has developed The Trauma Memoir, Lolita and Her Literary Sisters, and Representations of Childhood in Literature.
As an independent editor, Lott has worked with a number of published authors developing articles, web content, books, academic monographs, and other material. Read more at deborahalott.com.
About Openings
Openings is a recommendation column for Eckleburg readers, featuring fantastic books with fantastic openings, where readers first meet intriguing characters, settings and moments in which the mind can explore what is and what might be. Explore more great Openings with us at Eckleburg.
