From Publishers Weekly
The unforgiving yet ultimately liberating cycle of recovery from addiction of desperate attraction and triumphant avoidance is captured in freelance writer Moriarty's unsparing memoir. Writing with the passion and immediacy of a man who knows he might not have lived to tell his tale, the author, now in his mid-40s and living in Kansas City, Mo., conjures with accelerating vividness a long downward spiral. Over the years, drink, drugs and equally desperate and numbing gay male sex usually unprotected, occasionally anonymous, often lost to an alcoholic blackout take him to the edge of death itself. As with the recovery process, the sometimes exhausting pile-on of repetitious prose demands endurance. Particularly jarring, at first, are such authorial tics as the constant use of the too-cute phrases "Vitamin V" and "drinking daze." But readers who persevere past the first 75 pages or so will fall into the intense, present-tense rhythm of Moriarty's distinctive voice and tune into his compelling mantra of recovery, in which buzzwords and bromides become lifelines and affirmations. The reward for sticking with this book is the unveiling of a man remarkably devoid of self-pity and relentlessly honest in his self-criticism. Its appeal is most directly to the gay community, where alcohol and drug abuse have long gone hand in hand with issues of self-esteem and self-acceptance, but Moriarty's account shimmers with universal truth. Others in recovery, or in need of it, may well see their reflection in the mirror Moriarty holds up to his own life.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Moriarty was a gay refugee from a troubled childhood, marked by rejection, who fled to the false haven of booze, cocaine, and prescription drugs. Because his nocturnal drinking bouts ended only when sunrise signaled the time to shower, change, and go to work, he saw friendships die and relationships atrophy. Indeed, he went through man after man, only to return to the solace of "vitamin V"--vodka. For years before he stopped drinking, he attended meetings of and for alcoholics without talking about the fact that he was gay and so never gave an honest account of his life. Only after nearly dying did he experience a kind of rebirth that enabled him to confront and know himself. The self he discovered he presents sans self-pity. Recovering addicts' memoirs can be maudlin and melancholy, elegant and elegiac, visceral and vivid, or all those and more. Moriarty's simplicity and authenticity dispel the self-serving, confessional tone that all too often mars such accounts.
Whitney ScottCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
