Customer Reviews

Love Junkie: A Memoir

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I'll preface my review with three things:

I'm a writer.

My childhood sort of sucked.

I'm not a self-identified sex addict but am far better at seducing men than trusting them.

I procrastinated reading this book. I had it a few weeks, and I'd look at it, think about reading it, and then I'd not read it, procrastinate some more. I knew I'd feel the subject matter personally, that's why, and I needed to prepare myself for the emotional fallout.

Also, I wanted to feel ready to learn how to write better memoir.

So, for me, the reading experience would be two-fold. A big deal.

Once I started Rachel Resnick's Love Junkie, I couldn't put it down---or only begrudgingly so. How does a writer manage to write a story that feels simultaneously demoralizing and redemptive? That's a gift. I say that as a person who reads often, and reads varying types of books. I say that as a woman who's faced her own challenges with intimacy. I say that as a human being fumbling a path across the landscape of life. And I say this as a writer who felt artistically charged by reading this book. Thank you, Rachel Resnick, for all the above.

To you, scanning this review right now, I say: read Rachel Resnick's book if you are at all interested in memoir; read this book if you're at all interested in addiction; read this book if you're a feminist; read this book if you're anti-feminist. Read this book if you're a woman. Read this book if you've mistaken sex for love or used sex to create a false cushion of power or self worth. Read this book if you wish to write naked and honest, if you want to understand your own demons, if you wish to experience another layer of our human condition.

People, we're all fumbling here. Trust me.

That's how good this book is. Thank you.

Yes, this book is one erotic ride. We have an old fashioned made of wood hold your hands way up and scream goin' down roller coaster in my town. Reading Rachel Resnick's life story on love is like riding that thing.

Love Junkie is a well written naked tour of one woman's passion for finding love. Scary and honest fun. And did I say hot? I feel like a voyeur here just using the word "fun". But she let's you look. And it's a juicy and drippy through the glass turn-on that she does let you look. Not often pretty, however.

First, I'm embarrassed to say, as a man, that I liked this book. A lot. Men aren't supposed to read books about love much less about wanting it badly. Being bad while wanting love is more a guy thing. And more Resnick's approach here, actually. And more why this memoir is so hard to put down. She is by vocation a writer and a writing workshop instructor. Many will want to go home with teacher after reading this book. Too bad she's acquired some discretions.

Before I learned a few things about myself around love, I'd have been the next guy in line to sign up for her personal studies--if she had gone to coffee with me. Besides being beautiful and having a heart to die for, Resnick is so intensely committed to finding love you just want to go there with her on her path. Philosopher, lover, daughter, sister, writer, wannabe mom--she's all and becoming more. You want her. You want her to find what she's longing for. And that's why this book works.

As a writer and reader--and not that long ago an online mad bent on love mid life dating person--I don't buy the sex addiction thing. I side with sexologist Dr. Marty Klein and his now famous 1998 web article "Why there's no such thing as sex addiction--and why it really matters." I do believe wholeheartedly, however, in love addiction. And this is what the author is all about. Having spent the last year reading a dozen books on and by perhaps the most famous love addict--Augustine of Hippo--I was eager to hear this author's streetwise take as a woman. With his 999 books, Augustine set the West on an absolutely awful slash and burn anti-sex march, unabated since the 4th century. He is to this day the father of Catholic guilt and all things "pudenda", all things Western sexuality, and all things "area of shame". I found Resnick's longing and honesty and instruction far more gripping and helpful, if not equally painful.

Some 15 or so books are out there now on this sex addiction thing. Most seem to sell fear and victimhood. I'd skip them and go to Resnick's love memoir. Yes, read Love Junkie if you're a writer or a lover or an apprentice theologian or an online dater, or a bored housewife/househusband, or a daughter or a son or just want to know the heart of the matter around intimacy and intense human connecting. This book is not about getting your rocks off, but about a deep longing within, about getting your heart finally to a place you can begin to call home with another human being; starting with yourself.

Warning: There are some spoilers in this review. Rachel Resnick's powerful memoir starts with a bang. Any writer or avid computer user will cringe along with her as she discovers that her house has been burglarized and her hard drive drowned (don't worry, her data is later recovered). To find out the act's been committed by her ex only compounds our sympathy with her. But the plot thickens, and as Resnick takes us through her tumultuous childhood, filled with a mother so intent on her next boyfriend she barely has time for her two children and a father who leaves when she's 4 and later sides with his new wife over Resnick.

Sex lurks throughout her early years, from an exploration with a cousin to a boy who punches her for telling him she likes him to her reading of dirty books and magazines. As an adult, Resnick looks for the bad boys, but not the stereotypical James Dean-esque ones sporting leather jackets and tattoos. No, she looks for truly bad boys, ones who'll hook her and then torment her.

It's unclear where their bad behavior ends and Resnick's willful misreading of their cues begins. After one lover tells her "You're wasting your emotions on me. I don't believe in love," she writes, "This is the kind of love I recognize. The one where the conflicted lover pretends he doesn't feel the way he does feel, must feel." Resnick is clearly a smart, strong woman, and reading on as she makes the same mistakes over and over again is at times trying; like her friends who try to warn her away, as a reader one can see the hurt coming a mile away, the men pushed to being hurtful (not that most need much pushing) to get her to finally leave, or at least, retreat.

Of the man who would later drown her hard drive, she clings most especially hard, even after he dismisses her miscarriage and her pain over it, even after he disparages and yells at her in front of her friends. "I couldn't let go, because it was all I had. I, Rachel, had disappeared. I had poured every ounce of myself into this vision I had of the perfectly loveable Rachel, the perfect couple, the perfect solution to my so-far botched life. I'd invested everything I had in this fantasy," she writes near the end, summing up the crux of this book.

The writing here is sharp, with some sentences standing out as if in bold. Resnick has clearly spent many years thinking about what she terms "love addiction," and while I'm not 100% sure I agree with her about its roots in her childhood (though her mother's abandonment and death when she's a teenager, and her father's dismissal over her, of course had an impact), clearly there is something within her that draws her back to the bad boys again and again, against reason and logic. When she later has a passionate affair with a woman (also a fellow love junkie), she writes that she is "Turned on by her honesty," whereas before she had been "turned on by deception." This, coming after lush descriptions of male bodies, of intimate encounters rendered in graphic detail, that often turned, by her own desire, rough and kinky, is a revelation. Yet looking deeper, it's clear that on some level the intimacy she has shared with boyfriends is also based not just on physical attraction, but the glimpses of their past, especially their wounds, that cement her addiction. If Resnick has a type, it's chiseled, hunky, cruel and broken, a pattern she breaks with her female lover, for seemingly the first time.

There is not a proper "ending" to this book. Resnick doesn't neatly sum up the lessons she's learned, as so many memoirs, especially those of darkness and addiction do. She has certainly learned lessons, but they are ongoing, everyday ones. She may call her missteps on the path to recovery "slips," (as in, flings) but they are also, surely, opportunities for learning. Resnick weaves the highs of first meeting, of flirting and arousal and must-tear-clothes-off-now with the lows that seem to come, for her, right on the heels of these highs. She does not apologize for her errors, but simply lays them out, their truth speaking powerfully to anyone who's deliberately chosen someone we know, somewhere deep down, is bad for us. Highly recommended.

Exceedingly well-written and gut-wrenching, Love Junkie confronts not only the problem of sex addiction, but the related and more jarring issue of why some people are attracted to those who abuse them. A self-described "tough chick," Rachel Resnick explores with candor her attraction to abusive men - muscular, violent, artistic outlaw-types - the kind of men celebrated in American pop culture at least since Warren Beatty's portrayal of Clyde Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde. Except as Resnick powerfully illustrates, a compulsive attraction to such people can lead to degradation and hopelessness, even for a strong and creative woman like Resnick.

Told episodically, the narrative juxtaposes incidents from Resnick's childhood with graphic and often chilling descriptions of her romantic relationships. Resnick in stark terms describes a mentally-ill mother who was herself abused by men, and a largely absent father who in a certain sense was also the victim of a form of spousal abuse. It is difficult in memoir to convey the emotional truth of childhood from an adult's perspective, but Resnick succeeds admirably. When she recounts in a vivid, yet understated style how she sat in a bar while her mother got drunk and picked up a man, we as the reader experience viscerally the emotional trauma that the eleven-year-old girl must have suffered. No wonder that Resnick, who had to become tough simply to survive, became attracted to superficially strong men who, at first blush, seemed archetypal protectors.

Resnick's ultimate accomplishment is not her decision to confront and attempt to overcome her addiction, but her ability to turn her insights into action. She describes her most recent romantic relationship as tender and open, yet at the same time arousing and passionate. That these emotions can ultimately co-exist for the author makes this book a story of triumph.

"Love Junkie" is beautifully written yet it hurt me to read it.

I learned things about myself of which I had been unaware. The insights have continued to benefit me even several months later.

I think you'll be glad you read it.

Nobody grows up hoping to become an alcoholic or a heroin user; people don't sit around thinking of ways to become compulsive eaters or gamblers. But sex addiction? Didn't David Duchovny's stock rise the minute he checked himself into rehab for it? A few weeks ago, Oprah and Gayle argued with Ben Stiller and Chris Rock about whether sex addiction was real or just good fortune! "It sounds like college," Stiller said to loud laughter and wild applause.

They had obviously not read Rachel Resnick's riveting memoir, "Love Junkie," which traces her unbridled, compulsive love affairs and sexual adventures with men who abused and demeaned her at every turn.

Resnick found herself 40 years old, broke, childless and at the edge of the abyss. When her latest ex-boyfriend breaks into her apartment and urinates on her computer, she calls a girlfriend. "What a psycho," the friend says. "Her words comfort me," Resnick writes. "But there's a dull, nagging thought - who's psycho? I picked him, I kept him. I kept him after he began debasing me, just as I kept a lifetime of other men who seduced and then debased. So if he's psycho, aren't I psycho too? There's no way to dress this up and make myself look good in the process."

Resnick decides it's time to take stock, to try to finally get to the root of her problem.

And what a problem it is! Resnick comes to realizes that her mother was the original love junkie, leaving her kids alone at home when she went to bars, bringing home one man after another in her search to feel adored. Resnick learns early not to bother her mother when she's trying to seduce someone.

When her mother takes her along to a bar one afternoon, Resnick gets restless and tells her, "ñ'We've been here since school.' I look at the Miller Time clock, with the pretty beer-gold neon frame. 'It's almost six.' 'I'm talking to someone right now,' she hisses, her pale blue eyes narrowing. When she gets this drunk, her eyes turn into cold blue ice floes."

Resnick's father had left them and married a religious woman who did not like Rachel. She eventually refuses to let Resnick into her home, accusing her husband and his daughter of incest. "Batsheva was wrong," Resnick writes. "There was no incest. But there was a lot of .ñ.ñ. confusion. Blurred boundaries. Acknowledgment of my sexuality, then rejection. Have an apple dipped in honey; you're a filthy little girl."

Resnick writes about her Dickensonian past with no plea for sympathy; she lets the sex stories turn you on, and then riddle you with revulsion. Her self-contempt is at once her strongest suit and her Achilles heel. "At the time I thought this was as good as it got - I thought this was the greatest thing a man could offer me. Friendship? Inconceivable. Marriage? Pure fantasy. But an underwear model who wouldn't love me back? This was - oh, this was pure bliss. Never mind the painful yearning, the sleepless nights that followed his frequent disappearances. Forget about the tears I shed when he blew me off. When he did show up, all that anguish only fed the flame. This had to be love."

If there's a flaw in "Love Junkie," it's Resnick's not-so-cute idea of addressing the reader directly every now and then. It's jolting, but not as much as the high octane stories Resnick chooses to tell.

Hats & Eyeglasses: A Family Love Affair with Gambling

Compulsively readable, this book is uncomfortably sexy, sometimes horrifying, and often heartbreaking. Resnick's writing chops elevate this book above others on the same or similar subject, making this book work on a literary level, as well as being so in-your-face honest that it will probably help a lot of people. I strongly recommend.

This brutally honest account of Resnick's personal compulsion toward sex to fill the void of her horrific childhood is a must read for anyone who seeks to understand love and sex obsession. Resnick details in vivid prose her dysfunctional childhood wrought with abandonment, sexual confusion, her mothers alcoholism and neglect. It is a miracle she made it without turning to alcoholism herself. Her escape of choice was men and loveless abusive relationships instead. She confused sex with love and love with attention. She spent the majority of her adult life looking for love in every sexual encounter and male glance she received until one day she realized that the only place true love can be found is from within. Resnick seeks help in a local support group for those like her and finds solace and personal freedom. She sheds a bright light on a very dark subject.
Jennifer Storm Author of Blackout Girl: Growing Up and Drying Out in America

This account of a young woman's search for love, and how it morphs into sexual need, as substitute for the real thing -- speaks to an all too common pattern of self-destructive behavior I have observed in many women
nowadays. Brilliantly written, LOVE JUNKIE is the best nonfiction I have read this season.



M deKay, Editor Emeritus, Literary Guild of America

Rachel Resnick's exploration of love addiction opens with a traumatic moment in her life when she finally hits bottom. Already at a low point, her financial resources strapped, she is barely hanging on...And then she comes home to find that someone has drenched her computer's hard drive - her priceless possession where all of her work is stored. She describes the computer as "a living extension of my brain, an expression of my soul, a museum of my fragmented life..." This clearly demonstrates the devastation wrought by a former lover, bent on revenge.

So begins Resnick's tale Love Junkie: A Memoir, a chronicle of how and why she arrived at this place.

The child of divorced parents, she is subjected to numerous moments of neglect and even abandonment. At one point, she describes images of her father always walking away...Those images represent their relationship, one in which she never found the approval and acceptance she craved. Each parent, with his/her own limitations and lack of emotional availability,
created in her a vast emptiness - indeed deep emotional scars and pain, feelings she sought to recreate in every relationship she entered for the next several years.

Her mother dies when she is fourteen. At that point, she hasn't lived with her mother in a few years...Supposedly placed with her father, she is shifted from one living arrangement to another, always seeking a feeling of acceptance, even safety, which constantly eludes her. So the abandonment continued, on a different level.

As she seeks to understand the source of her own complicity in bringing her to this lowest point in her life, Resnick begins at the beginning. Alternating with descriptions of moments in her childhood that are key elements in understanding her journey and why she has arrived at this place, she also describes each adult relationship in some detail, pinpointing the degradation and humiliation of always seeking out the dangerous, unavailable partners who could, somehow, recreate the emotional upheaval with which she is so familiar. She pushes the boundaries with each new relationship, as if hoping to fill the void, yet always reverting to familiar patterns that leave her abandoned and bereft.

Sometimes these explorations are almost too gritty for the reader to accept, but when examining the sources, indeed the etiology of her behavioral choices, it is perfectly clear how and why each step is taken. The reader almost expresses that "a-ha!" moment, as the familiar patterns are recreated.

Most illuminating, finally, is the path to recovery. Brilliantly described and authentically explored, with 12-step meetings at the beginning of her journey to emotional well-being, the author demonstrates how the path is uneven, with occasional slips; she also reveals that with
determination, healing can happen. Her memoir, with all of her angst exposed, is a brave and triumphant declaration of the power of the human spirit.

Laurel-Rain Snow
Author of:
Embrace the Whirlwind, etc.