Customer Reviews

Crazy Love

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Crazy Love is an apt title for a memoir about an abusive relationship. It is crazy to anyone on the outside looking in. It is crazy for the woman to stay in the relationship. It is crazy to take one minute of abuse and stay for more. It is crazy to think an abusive man will change.
I read this well written book in one sitting. Did I feel sorry for poor Conor? For his miserable childhood, yes. For his inability to handle his rage as an adult, no. I wanted him punished. I want him exposed now and publicly ridiculed.
For those of you who think there are always two sides of a story, you are wrong. Men who do this should be put on a public offender list, and be branded as abusers for the rest of their lives.
When she was nearly choked to death by Conor before they were married, I thought she was crazy to stay. When she went to counseling with him after their separation, I was stunned. How crazy could she be?
A funny reaction from someone like me. I went through the same thing 40 years ago. What this books points out, so well, is that there is no logical explanation as to why a woman would remain in such a relationship. You do enter a surreal world of denial and shame. How do you admit that the person you love most in the world, and who professes to love you as much, is beating the stuffing out of you? How do you leave when you have no money, no home to go to? How do you face the humiliation? Trust me when I say that the humiliation is nearly unbearable. Do you know many people will wonder what you did to make your husband beat you? Do you know that many people, even your family, will think you are probably exaggerating?
Nothing in this book is exaggerated. It is a true and heartbreaking story of how easy it is to find yourself in a crazy world, and the struggle to wake up from the nightmare and regain your sanity.

Crazy Love was a very quick read. It was written more like an extended magazine feature than a memoir with multiple layers and true craft. I felt it was an interesting read but ultimately a tale about a young affluent woman who with her Harvard degree, anorexic past, alcoholic pedigree, falls for the wrong man. I was hoping for more insight from the author than what she was willing to give. I wanted to know how she felt about herself and not just the actions she took. All in all I would recommend waiting for the paperback version.

I heard the author of this book being interviewed on NPR today, and I just had to respond to one thing, because I'm a guy (unfortunately the NPR comments are closed): The moment this abusive guy said [paraphrasing] "If you don't want to be my property, then get out", THAT was the signal to leave. Guys are pretty direct a lot of the time. When he said that, he was telling the literal truth of how it would be. His property or leave. The moment you hear anything like that, grab your stuff, walk out the door, and don't look back. Don't make the mistake of thinking he doesn't mean it. I know men and women have different communication styles, but this is one instance where women need to know how to understand what he's saying. I am not in any way implying that any of this situation was her fault. I'm just pointing out, because I want this to become common knowledge among women, because I have a sister, that a statement like that is a clear danger signal.

This book held my attention, but like many confessional books, suffers from too much information. I wasn't interested in the minor details about the author's parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Ditto, the details of her sex life, her drug problems (which didn't keep her from being admitted to Harvard), the chintzy Christmas gift her mother gave her one year or the time her father forgot to meet her for breakfast. And it's a minor point, I suppose, but the changes in geographic details were so obvious as to cast some doubt on the author's credibility. Springtime cherry blossoms and 3 am visits to City Hall in Chicago? I don't think so. The details of the abusive relationship she was in were indeed harrowing and her focus on why some men are abusers rather than why women stay interesting. But what was ultimately disappointing is that the the author seems to have no regret about not charging her ex-husband with a crime. Indeed, she apparently never even considered it. While she herself became free of the abuse, what about the other women he no doubt abused after her? She ponders how abusers can be stopped. Putting them in jail and giving them a criminal record is a very good way to stop them.

Very readable but left me wondering - why did her father provide financial support to the battering husband? Why did her aunt let him move in? Why did she never press charges and why, oh, why did she go to counseling with him AFTER he almost killed her? It could have been a much better book had it been written with more insight as opposed to the Lifetime movie treatment provided.

I am pretty puzzled by the negative reviews here. "Crazy Love" is a courageous, unflinching look inside an abusive relationship. It is a difficult but well-written, powerful story.

Leslie Morgan Steiner does us all a service by illustrating the pattern she experienced in her abusive relationship, especially the small steps her partner took to draw her in--his charm and his neediness, their deep connection, and then the boundary testing and slow escalation of violence. When she did not call his early possessiveness and jealousy into question, he increased his control over her, through isolation by moving to Vermont, financial dependence when Leslie left her New York job, alienation of her family, and then increasing violence. He was a Wall Street financier, she was a Harvard grad and Seventeen Magazine editor. On the outside they looked like they had everything going for them. Behind closed doors, Conor punched Leslie, belittled her, and threatened her, daring her to leave at vulnerable times when she had nowhere else to go.

The author admits her blind spot: she deeply loved him and wanted to rescue him from his own violent past as an abused child. It took the realization that he truly could kill her to cut through her denial, call the police, and get help and get away from her abuser forever.

Leslie Morgan Steiner paints a full picture in her narrative: her own family had serious dysfunctions. She herself was a recovering addict, just out of her teen years and inexperienced in healthy relationships, who had only recently graduated from college when she met Conor. Her parents had their own divorce drama playing out while this was all going on. Leslie was vulnerable in so many ways and admits how deeply attached she allowed herself to become to Conor, even as he was hurting her. Telling the truth about abuse can be the first step to getting help, and I believe this story will help save lives by allowing other women to examine the truths about abuse, and then take steps to escape the violence.

One irony about this book: in many interviews Leslie Morgan Steiner has said that when we talk about domestic violence, she wishes we focused more on why abusers hurt the people they love. Her own memoir can only be told from her perspective, so it is about how she became pulled in and why she stayed for so long. But I applaud both her writing and her continued speaking out about the problem and cycle of domestic violence, which affects millions of American families every year.

This book recounts the author's first marriage to a messed up, controlling, abusing man. I found it fascinating and read it in one sitting, but at the same time I ended up ultimately feeling dissatisfied. The author actually does not give us a lot of insight into what led her to the decisions that she made, and I get the sense that she still doesn't know. It is more a recounting of events than a memoir with any layers of discovery or self-knowledge.

I admire the author's honestly and willingness to be open about some truly stupid things that she'd done - it takes a lot of courage to put that in print. Like others, I found her constant references to being blond, Harvard-educated, and a WASP to be overkill. We get it, really. It is as if she needs to remind herself of those facts, and that she truly believes that those are the most important things about her, and reasons for the world to envy and admire her.

There were a few cheap shots towards family members, and just enough about her truly messed up adolescence to confuse the story - is there a connection between growing up in an alcoholic family, being an attention-seeking anorexic, and allowing herself to become completely dependent on a man who hurt and scared her? Absolutely, but we don't get any insight into what that connection is. From my own experience, if you grow up around alcohol you get very skilled at pretending things are normal when they are not.

Anyway, I enjoyed the book as a confessional, a train-wreck, and a gripping read, but I ended up not really liking the protagonist very much, and thinking she still has a lot of work to do to really understand her own actions and motivations.

Let me state upfront that I am one of those people who always wonder why women stay in a domestic abusive relationship, and when I looked at this book, when the author says in the foreword why she is writing this book "Maybe the next time you come across a woman in an abusive relationship, instead of asking why anyone stays with a man who beats her, you'd have the empathy and courage to help her on her way", I just knew I had to read this book.

In "Crazy Love: A Memoir" (328 pages), author Leslie Morgan Steiner brings the chilling retelling how she, an accomplished woman on many levels (Harvard grad, Chicago MBA) fell in love in her mid-20s with a man who then started to hit her and abuse her, after she had make the emotional commitment to that man. The first half of the book brings the happy times, how they met, fell in love and they seemed like the perfect couple.The the warning signs start cropping up, and before she knows it, she is living a terror. "I saw the pink blur of his hand as he slapped me hard across my face. My skin stung as my teeth cut through the soft, wet flesh of my mouth." The author details how her man, Conor, was abused and beaten as a child himself, and she makes it her mission to 'save' him because she loves him so. Of course there is no saving to be done. She gives him an ultimatum: one more time and I'm out of here, and yet he does it again. "I would have never given up. Conor gave up. He knew that beating me that night guaranteed I would leave him for good."

This is a devastating book on many levels. I can only commend the author for writing this book, after all these years (in the Epilogue, she tells us that she's now happily married with 3 young kids). Shame on all the men abusing their women, really. It makes me revolt. But it happens, and my heart goes out to all the women that are going through it. This book made me better understand how difficult it is for them to actually escape from such terrible situations.

I certainly respect what the Author went through, but I can't hardly be too sympathetic to somebody who has to point out OBSESSIVELY every page or so that she is blond (like everybody else in her family), that she is a WASP, that she went to Harvard, that she has an MBA, in not so many words, that she's so much better than anybody else. Almost looks like she can't believe with such credentials, she gets beaten up like some "Hispanic woman with grocery bags who smells like a day old empanadas". The books reads easily, but the writing is not especially stylish, sort of like an extended reportage from Cosmopolitan or comparable. What really is beyond me is how somebody with such pedigree didn't know that chocolate is poison for dogs and kills her Doberman with a daily dose of Reeese peanut butter cup. The book really doesn't shed any light about the mysteries of spousal abuse: I finished the book and I didn't know why she stayed with the guy who, besides beating the hell out of her, was so beneath her wasn't even funny (although blond himself). I actually came to the conclusion that he raised his hands on her (and worse, way worse) maybe because she was so obnoxious and full of herself.

Her book reads more like an accumulation of short vignettes with no common voice that ties them all together. It is sad because the author has such a powerful story, yet keeps a vast majority of it to herself. She reports her abuse almost completely void of emotion, which makes it difficult to really connect with the author. You want to connect so badly and just when you think you are able to really connect with her, she pulls out sarcastic one-liners after almost every recount of abuse. It would have been much more powerful to let the reader sit with the uncomfortableness of her abuse and share in her pain. Rather the awkward uncomfortableness you feel from her sarcastic remarks.
It is still worth the read, wait for it in paperback.