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Marketing copy simplifies. Mine suggests my book is a juicy tell-all about obsessive love and heroin. That is true but it's also about codependency, care work, "true love," motherhood, and feminism. A thread>>>
Growing up, I understood devotion to be the hallmark of true love. I gorged myself on songs, movies, and books that validated the idea that the love of a man was the highest thing to strive for.
Pop culture and my family's stories also taught me that (as Nazareth sang) love hurts
If you grow up hearing these love-as-pain-and-sacrifice stories and thinking that caring for others is the cornerstone of femininity, and then come into contact with addiction? Well, you're pretty fucked
I became codependent—the name given to the "disease of relationships" we develop when living alongside addiction
Codependency (a word many no longer use) has a long, interesting history that I trace back to the temperance movement in the book
The struggle to get away from alcoholic men is tangled up with the struggle for suffrage and a broader bid for freedom and self-determination among women. That dream was only available to white women for a long time
The founding of Al Anon and the mainstreaming of self-help brought 'codependency' greater visibility in the 80s and 90s but it has never been taken very seriously
My book aims to take this "other side" of addiction seriously. We say it's a "family disease" but we usually only hear the rollicking and gruesome stories of addicts themselves, not those left picking up the pieces
This book tells my story and also asks: what is a relationship for? How can we sustain love without losing ourselves? Are boundaries compatible with romantic passion? How does motherhood change the terms of love?
Before coronavirus, I hoped my book might spark a larger conversation about codependency. Now that seems unrealistic, but I hope those who need this book will find it. I feel for people currently trapped in homes where the fire of addiction is raging.
I worked hard on this and I'm proud of it. It's out from @CrownPublishing a week from today and you can order it here https://bookshop.org/books/good-morning-destroyer-of-men-s-souls-a-memoir-of-women-addiction-and-love/9780525576679
