Customer Reviews

Like Being Killed

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Ellen Miller writes eloquently and vividly. Like Being Killed is a page turner beautifully written. The story digs beyond the surface of a promiscuous, masochistic woman and her fetish for heroin. Social issues such as AIDS, sex, and addiction are intertwined with the story of a woman seeking self-sanction. Unsettling sex scenes with a sadistic plumber are graphic and austere. After reading this book, you will never look at a cucumber the same way again. Drugs are not glorified in this piece of literature; they are portrayed as truth-revealing components. Miller conveys realistic consequences to narcotic-related actions without imposing her morality in any way, shape, or form. Of course, Like Being Killed, has its problems. The friendship between main characters Susie and Ilyana is established weakly, and they seem to go from love to hate to love with one puff of the pipe. The ending is not as well-rounded as the reader hopes, but this attempt from a new writer is both promising and refreshing. Like Being Killed has to be one of the best books I have read this year. It is both profound and thought-provoking. It explores the essence of existence in a world filled with complex decisions, all the while delivering a large dose of humor. All in all, a great read.

It's a bit humbling to admit, but I've never in my life gotten more involved with a novel than this one. I began to pray, in the middle of my 'relationship', with, or more accurately my 'addiction' to, this novel, that it would pay off, it would look up and see the sun and not end as terribly bleakly as it begins. I imagined that if it ended badly, it could put me in bed for weeks, I was so involved. Well, it works out. It looks up.

Overall, it was like putting on glasses for the first time, seeing a motion picture film for the first time, getting kissed for the first time. I hadn't known a book could be so vivid, could punch me square in the eye like this. I was wed to it, reading it in bed until long past 12, dodging phone calls, taking it with me everywhere.

I will admit that I can see how some people could find the language overbearing and showboaty, a lot of big words are used, and it's occasionally annoying or disruptive. But overall, this is an amazing book. If you can take it. I want to say to the prospective reader, be careful! It'll change you. It's dark, gory, terrifying, and terribly honest.

Bill Green, Shaker Heights, Ohio.

A harrowing story of love and loss and still loving, this novel is a gripping tale and an exercise in moral reflection perhaps best summed up in Neitzsche's remark, "From your poison you brewed your balsam." The poison is heroin--but heroin also as a metaphor of having and wanting, as applicable to everyday life as to a world of more obvious craving.

Miller refuses to dissociate the vile and the virtuous. Hope has as much to do with the depths as with the heights of life. Redemption is no resolution but the heart and sheer fact of survival, which is assurance enough.

Miller writes with the lucidity and concision of Kafka and the gusto of Nietzsche, with a compelling feel for everyday reality and sentiment. She speaks as easily of the pleasures of baking a pie as she does of matters so revolting as to turn away any with a weak stomach.

This combination of brutal honesty and affection for the commonplace makes for what is surely one of the most unusual and thought-provoking novels on the market.

The very negative review here pretty much defines why this book is so brilliant. "Just because your parents are off doesn't mean you have to go shoot heroin" it says, demonstrating a typical person's notion of Manichean dualism that Ilyana Meyerovitch (the protagonist) and Ellen Miller explode in "Like Being Killed". This book is about the torment of a sanitized, infantilized, paternalistic, cold, and cruel world for incredibly intelligent and sensitive people, and about the extreme means they will pursue to find some sort of pleasure and meaning within it. Unlike many books depicting female heroin addicts (those 'Just Say No' morons should realize that heroin has less effect on mental processes than alcohol, and was legal until the 1920's; it also is the close cousin to a medical miracle, morphine), Ilyana is incredibly intelligent, chooses her destiny (is not stereotypically 'lured into it' by a boyfriend, like so many writers pathetically depict female addicts), and (unlike the aforementioned review) does not ever engage in prostitution. If you are a judgmental, callous, and rather simplistic sort who loves to stigmatize and incarcerate all those who do not live Romper Room lives regardless of their depth and humanity as individuals, then avoid this book, as you will feel that you have been 'robbed'. If you are a person of depth, feeling, and intelligence, than you are in for the read of a lifetime

Simply the most extraordinary novel I've read in years. I started it and had to stop doing everything for two days: couldnt think about anything else, do anything but read it. Astonishingly intelligent and original. Raw and visceral. A unique female (and yet universal, for certain personality types) voice: amazing focus on the body and language: perhaps the text of life. Brilliantly and evocatively examines the psychology of addition w/out explaining it in obvious terms or phrases. A soul-mate of a book. Read it or literally miss out. Now sits in my Top 10 Novels of all time: best description of it? A linear emotional collison between kathy Acker, Henry Miller, Dorothy ALlison and real painful life. I'm not joking when I say I'm re-reading it almost straight away.

This is a remarkable debut that managed to hit the best seller lists in both San Francisco and England. Yet the publisher here in the States seems to have been totally disinterested in giving it any support or promotion. Curious, since everyone I know who has managed to stumble across it has been totally blown away. Don't let this one escape you.

After finishing *Like Being Killed* I am finding it difficult to imagine reading another book and being similarly affected. Certain moments of this book will remain with me for a long, long time. This won't always be a pleasant thing.

To all considering purchasing this book, you will want to read it more than once. I know I will read it again.

Wishing Ellen Miller a long, prolific writing career, one which I will certainly follow.

Ellen Miller writes with sophistication and control. Her command of language and her use of vocabulary indicate that her extraordinary writing ability is a gift we (readers) will be receiving for many, many years to come. It's difficult to believe that Like Being Killed is her first novel--it reads as though Miller has published dozens of books already. If her first novel is this amazing, it's hard to imagine what experience and age will add to her future work. While her subject matter is difficult, emotional, painful, humerous, intelligent, complex and heart-wrenching, she handles all of it with confidence and a refreshing lack of sentimentality and self-indulgence. Ilyana, her narrator, is brilliant, addicted, and, at times, insane. But Miller tackles this enormous task of getting into the mind and soul of her narrator and forces us to join her there, to become Ilyana--a task that is daunting, yet made ultimately appealing because of Miller's powerful, bracing, and mind blowing talent. No one should miss this book.

An amazing book... "Like Being Killed" is a book that I would recommend to anyone who wants to see the "darker" side of life and what it can be about. The descriptions are intense. The writing is factual. As soon as I began to read this book, I couldn't put it down. Ellen Miller takes the reader on a magic journey through Ilyana's world, living it all through her, making you love and understand Ilyana for what she was, who she is, and who she'll become... Life can be good, but brutally tough at times. Definitely worth buying, reading, and offering it to a friend.

I've always wanted to review this book, but I've always been afraid that I wouldn't do it justice, on the off-chance I would influence anyone either way. There would be no mistaking my affirming that this book is one of the most incredible things I ever read, but could really say WHY?

I bought this years ago, when it was new, at a small bookstore in Manhattan, and never really saw it anywhere since. I picked it up because I found junkie novels as addicting as drugs and I desperately wanted something new to read. Like Being Killed is my second favorite book ever (only usurped by John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany). A book gets that kind of status, where it's read and re-read and eventually get's bathtub-soaked, loses it's cover, and most of it's pages, when I feel like I didn't read it all, but that I was there, and when I finished it, I feel like I ended a relationship. When I have to discipline myself not to read it more than once a month, so it doesn't become mundane. When I forget the characters weren't real people in my life. Like Being Killed was one of those books.

The funny thing is, I really didn't like Ilyana. If she had been real, I don't think I'd wanna hang out with her. Yet I went on her journey, wept with her, got dopesick with her, went through betrayal with her, and found in her a voice to feelings I've had but could never articulate.

4 pages in, Miller writes, "Inwardly, I atoned for my inevitable klutziness, while simultaneously trying to conceal that I was atoning," and I felt the first of many bursts of YES!! I know exactly what you mean! I do that all the freaking time!! And I was hooked.

Yes, the tangents Ilyana goes on sometimes can be annoying. I skimmed right past them during my first reading--I mean, homegirl's sitting around getting high, and WHAM--suddenly, she's right in the middle of a thesis about, say, Holocaust history, metaphysics, anatomy, biology, medicine, Classical arts, linguistics, and I would be wondering what I missed, how'd we get from there to HERE? AFter a few readings, I understood it more, so I'd encourage anyone to re-read it. Over and over. If you're not spellbound, ya haven't read it enough times to get it! And, anyway, it was a great way to read a beautiful novel about friendship, betrayal, psychosis, addiction, self-destruction and redemption and simultaneously amass a LOT of random information! Suddenly, I had a little bank of knowledge about cell suicide, cognitive dissonance, the difference between dystonic and syntonic psychotics, critical flicker fusion, the word schmecken, and tons of random Catholic saints (I mean, who ever heard of Father Maximillan Kolbe, patron saint of addicts, or Saint Afra, patron saint of fallen women, or Saint Dympha, patron saint of the mentally ill?) It got me to start reading Primo Levi. It gave me sayings to fit any occasion (A sample--"The trouble with mental illness is, no matter how bad it gets, it never kills you," and the profound, "I understood for the first time that to recieve requires as much genorosity as to give.") I think I gained 10 IQ points just from a couple of readings.

Like Being Killed is also completely heartbreaking. You know from the beginning that Ilyana is down in the gutter because of the loss of "Susannah", that she was something beautiful, light and that somehow Ilyana did something to destroy them both. So, throughout the chapters with Susie's entrance into Ilyana'a apartment and life, which reads like a dysfunctional love story, there's always a feeling of impending doom. We know that the loss shatters Ilyana, that she is using the most effective way to forget, but cannot. "Whether I lived in accordance to her, or opposition to her, it was alongside her influence" (who hasn't been through THAT?) During some of the most intense, loving scenes between the two of them--the bath, the peach pies--I would hope, maybe this time Ilyana wouldn't screw it up. I would greive for them. And, I would wonder where the hell MY Susie is.

Only in the post-Christmas scene, where Paul comes back from Hopewell with Susie, dopesick and miserable outwardly and physically as acutely as Ilyana is abstractly, can you understand what made her promise to Paul negate her loyalty to Susie. You understand why she struggled.

And during the other chapters, copping and getting ripped off when she hooks up with Paul, her sadomasochistic relationship with the plumber (and I thought I was pretty worldly, but it was horrifying. I'd never HEARD of stuff like that), you sense that Ilyana's not as screwed as she thinks she is. Susie is still out there, and having been touched by her, it can't be undone. You root for her redemption, root for her reconciliation, despite what Susie becomes. And the new, damaged Susie is even easier to love than the healthy, sturdy, innocent Susie we met early on.

Oh, God, how do I describe how this book made me feel? It's turning meinto a mushy little dork. I'll shut up now.

Okay, for anyone who skimmed past this, just read this part--

Like Being Killed is amazing. You have to see it through. You HAVE to read it more than once. And during the best parts--The peach pies, the confrontation between Susie and Ilyana after the truth comes out, Ilyana's scene on the pier on the west side, when her suicide is thwarted by transsexual theif hooker Gabriella--really focus. Turn the TV off. Tell your boyfriend to shut up for a minute. Take your phone off the hook. And really pay attention. Take it in. Feel it.

Ellen Miller, will you PLEASE write something else, girlfriend?