Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

Chapter One

On a Hunter s Moon, I burned his name. The drummer in my band told me to do it. We were sitting at the bar drinking well whiskeys and cans of beer. A Hunter s Moon is powerful for intention setting, she said, winding her long, chemically straightened hair into an apple fritter ­sized bun atop her head. She secured it not with an elastic but with a wrist flick and a twist of another piece of her hair, some sleight of hand I d always envied in the girls who could do it. It stayed in place perfectly. She pulled a few baby hairs out to fall in front of her ears, and they made small, wispy parentheses around her face. Fleetwood Mac was playing.

Write down what you want and burn it, she said, knocking back the last of her drink.

Women suggest these types of things to one another.

A Hunter s Moon is powerful for intention setting. This was the kind of oblique advice I was getting a lot. I didn t know where to hook into it, how to listen better to make it feel real, like something I could act on. Still, I let it wash over me, this language I was trying to learn. My earnest, beautiful, California girlfriends, knowing I needed them, were doing their very best, circling with candles and crystals. I welcomed their warmth the way I imagined I was supposed to, with an open, wistful gaze, and slow, New Age nodding. Just that week, one had shown up with a bottle of rosé and made the measured, straight-­faced suggestion that I sage him from the premises. This will cleanse your space of him, she said, proffering a bound, faded bundle of expired flora and a lighter.

I was constantly cleansing him from my space. Every few days, for example, I d clean our bathroom, wiping with Lysol-­drenched paper towels the delicate spray of dried blood that lay over most surfaces and reminded me of the splatter of colored dye on the outside of a jawbreaker, the first layer that makes a white paste in your mouth as you suck it away. Living with a junkie involves a lot

Nina Renata Aron is a writer and editor living in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

If co-dependency is a girl s song, as Nina Renata Aron writes, her scorching memoir proves it can be a beautiful one, too. . . . Aron details the spiral, of screaming matches and vomit and things thrown across rooms. . . . A gritty tribute to the women who stick around too long. David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly

Aron s debut memoir unfurls her evocative story of falling in love with and upending her life over a man addicted to heroin. A searing sociohistorical excavation of codependency. O: The Oprah Magazine

Stunning . . . Reading it was like a first sip of water after a 20-mile run in the heat. . . . It shows us that addicts are more than statistics, their codependents more than sniveling, whimpering, and brokenhearted. These are real people, rendered by Aron with eye-opening complexity and dynamism. In this book, the underrepresented and overlooked world of the codependent emerges from the bargain basement of self-help and shopworn homilies into the realm of love and loathing, birth and death, blood and urine. Into the realm, in other words, of the literary. The Washington Post

A disturbing, richly conveyed story of dysfunction and warped love . . . Aron s dark, gorgeously narrated memoir of destructive codependency will captivate readers. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

In Aron s candid and heart-wrenching memoir, the gnarled knots of love and addiction are untied and tangled and tied again. . . . 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. Booklist (starred review)

A master class in memoir. Shelf Awareness

What a marvel this book is, that such a harrowing subject can be rendered with such tenderness. Any person who has ever put herself in harm s way for love will see herself in these pages.