Drunken angel

Whether the subject is parental abuse, alcoholism, or the travails of the writing life, Kaufman's (Jew Boy; Matches) memoir violently grabs your attention, refusing to let up until he's had his say. This is a brutish and riveting trek through a talented and severely alcoholic psyche. Those who persist are rewarded with stylish, intense writing and the intimate details of the author's metamorphosis. Kaufman grew up in the Bronx with an abusive mother who was a Holocaust survivor. Obese as a child, he was attacked and humiliated by neighborhood bullies, and began drinking in high school. After throwing away an opportunity for a football scholarship, Kaufman studied American literature and Jewish studies at the City College of New York, but his drinking hinders any attempt at serious writing or forming stable, healthy relationships. He becomes a minor star in the emerging spoken word scene in New York, but was soon stumbling around onstage, "incoherent, a drunken nightmare figure." The second half of Kaufman's memoir details his recovery; his move to San Francisco; his burgeoning literary career; and his acknowledgment of the daughter he abandoned: "And so I look back on my life and it is divided in parts: my drunk years and my sober ones, and I can hardly believe the beauty, meaning and victory that have attended my sober years." (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

An avant-garde writer recalls his journey from gutter drunk to PEN American member.Kaufman (Matches, 2005, etc.) throws in his lot with the boozer bards in this second memoir about his near-lethal alcohol addiction, recovery and long struggle to become a writer. After touching briefly on his horrific childhood in the Bronx as the son of a French Jewish Holocaust survivor who beat him mercilessly (the territory of his first memoir, Jew Boy, 2000), Kaufman details his traumatizing years with the Israel Defense Forces and his torrid, adulterous affair (which inspired his novelMatches). Kaufman's blackout drinking is epic throughout and reaches a crescendo when he returns to New York suffering psychotic delusions from PTSD sustained in the Israeli Army. The author's narrative whips schizophrenically between manic moments of literary self-aggrandizing and deeply depressive moments of shocking wreckage ("Awoke in gutters or curled up to keep warm on manhole covers and grates in cul-de-sacs, filthy, nauseous, hungover, astonished at my gargantuan appetite for the abyss"). Acceptance into Columbia's Master of Fine Arts program, his involvement with the emerging Spoken Word poetry scene and the birth of his daughter briefly buoyed him, but not enough to keep him from the bottle. Eventually he hit rock bottom and was kicked out of a crash pad by his acid-dealer roommates, becoming homeless. Kaufman's sexual perversions sometimes serve his theme of bondage, but occasionally veer into misogyny. Literature literally saved the author, on a bench in New York's Tompkins Square Park when a fellow poet talked him into trying recovery, and the second half of the book follows Kaufman's journey to sobriety in San Francisco. The author's intention to stake his territory among the literary elite is clear, but such efforts can feel name-droppy at times (an anecdote about desperately seeking Isaac Bashevis Singer at his Upper West Side apartment is interesting, but a listing of Kaufman's Columbia classmates is not). Although the author's tendency to drop the "I" from his sentence often feels affected, it also occasionally hit its mark, lending a hard edge to Kaufman's largely intoxicating prose.A slightly bloated but addictive memoir of self-destruction, recuperation and a literary coming-of-age.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book Eleven CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO Why an angel? Because I believe that, in time, that is what we become in sobriety, if we last long enough, to the end. Not the winged kind, no. Not some haloed cupid or sword swinger but a kind of flawed angel, without wings, that belongs to no religion but rather to a species of human heartbreak unlike any other known. Alcoholics and addicts are unlike any other people I've ever met. I am unlike most people. A blazing mutant of some kind. A wondrous freak. In my mind lurks an urge that will be with me to the end, to put a bottle to my lips and drink myself to death. A judge and jury that I wake up to each morning has pronounced a verdict of guilt on me for no crime that I have committed, just for being alive, and has sentenced me to death, not by guillotine or rope but by a single drink. It is the strangest thing, this sentence of death, this disease I have which tests me to the max and each day holds my existence accountable to the very universe, a god no religion can know as we drunks know it. A god of drunks who goes with us into our prisons and gutters, bedrooms and businesses, flophouses and alleys, hospitals and mansions, and patiently waits with hand on our shivering shoulders as we groan through yet one more night of near death, waits to see if maybe this time we've had pain enough, loss enough, enough hangover, illness, fear, to ask for help. And yet many cannot ask, and die right before the god of drunks, who I think must weep helplessly when this occurs. So many lose heart and fall. I have seen so many of my brothers and sisters in recovery fall. I have seen so many beautiful people die. The poet found in his room OD'd with a needle in his arm. He was my best friend. The twenty-year-old drummer who killed himself over a romance gone wrong. Nice kid. The young artist who drank and was found murdered in her Tenderloin hotel room. She was so talented. The buddy who drank and wound up facedown in a river in Pennsylvania, drowned. The ones, so many, who jumped off the bridge or the roof or put a gun barrel to their heads and squeezed the trigger, or in private ate painkillers until found on the floor brain-dead, or perished young of a destroyed liver. That young nurse, a mother of three, who had everything, beautiful children, loving husband, looks to die for, a house with two cars in the garage, who also had this little problem that she couldn't stay sober or stop smoking crack, no matter how many meetings she attended or advice she tried to follow, and one day returned home to that garage, ran a hose, turned on the ignition, and gassed herself to death. When you have seen as much of that as I have in my sobriety, in the last twenty years, how can I not regard my own reflection with amazement that I am still here. Why me? How did I get so lucky? Really, I don't know. I want to think that I've done something right, but in truth, I know better. I do believe in a Higher Power and I do work the 12 steps and go to meetings and work with drunks of every kind and description, yet it doesn't seem like enough, it never does. I never feel that I can repay what has been given to me. The love that has been shown. The patience and straight-shooting counsel that has saved my butt time and again. I have met in recovery men and women who are the greatest human beings I have ever known but don't want their names advertised. Anonymous, quiet angels, invaded by death, propelled by light, who move among us with quiet grace and private suffering and seek each day to help those around them without fanfare or reward. Excerpted from Drunken Angel: A Memoir by Alan Kaufman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.