Customer Reviews

Love Me More: An Addict's Diary

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It is easy in a first novel to fall into the trap of preaching, or manufacturing drama. It is easy to create a main character who is, even in her struggles, perfect and saintlike.

Goska creates a character whose journey is sometimes hard to watch, sometimes painful to read. It is not as neat and warm and fuzzy as, say, a pleasant afternoon read for the Oprah crowd. Sometimes her main character is open, honest and giving-- in other moments, she can be a self-ceneterd jerk.

But at all times this woman is real and believable and completely absorbing, and her struggles to find a love and purpose and hope that can fill her up are moving and touching and altogether real.

This is a challenging work, but it is a challenge worth meeting.

Why read this book? This beautifully written story is compelling and yet thorny, like a wild rose, with all the lingering after-taste of great poetry. Danusha Goska somehow hammers nails into places in my mind that I never knew I had; yet in other places she plants healing kisses. Nothing is predictable, not the main character, not the plot, not the time progression. This book is a roller-coaster of emotion and experience and thought that you will never forget.

Miraswava had me angry enough to throw the book down, aching enough to pick it back up, and laughing hard enough to draw stares. I am placing "Love Me More" among the Keepers on my shelf. This is definitely a book you will want to keep, because portions of it will haunt your thoughts and force you to go back and read it all again.

I first heard of Danusha Goska when she asked if I could set up a reading for her at Boxcar Books, and dropped of a copy of her book to sell on consignment. I was happy to set up a reading for any local author, but after reading Love Me More, I was thrilled!

Love Me More: An Addict's Diary is not at all what it may seem from the title. When I first picked up the novel, I expected, at worst, a self-help book, and at best, a dreary memoir about a woman whose boyfriend doesn't pay enough attention to her. Don't be put off by the title; the book is miles better than those six words could ever express.

Instead, Love Me More is a very multidimensional, far-reaching novel about the healing journey of a complex woman. It is the story of Miroswava Hudak, daughter of Slavic immigrants and survivor of child abuse, and her transformation from an insecure, unmotivated woman to a brilliant teacher who changes the lives of her students.

The first question that any reader of this book will ask is this: to what addiction does the title refer? At first, it seems that Mira's addiction is food, or conversely, dieting. The novel is written as a collection of diary entries, and the diary begins with Mira's diet. At the beginning of the book, Mira thinks and writes about food ("Food is the problem") and her body image ("And so, I am a fat woman") quite a bit. But as the novel progresses, Mira gets a job that she truly loves, teaching a class called "Summer Session for Non-Traditional Students" at Tillman College, and it becomes clear that her real addiction is caring for her students. After her class begins, she writes less and less of food.

One thing that the book made me realize is the universal truth that every person harbors insecurities and ideas of themselves that may be completely different from the reality of their lives. For instance, in the beginning of the book, when Mira is between jobs and spends most of her time alone or with self-righteous, condescending roommates, her diary reflects her as insecure, lonely and somewhat pathetic. But once she moves into her own apartment, makes new friends and begins teaching again, it is clear that she is in fact confident, personable and an inspiration to her students.

Mira's job makes her contemplate the differences between those students classified as "Non-Traditional" (read: non-white, from a different country, not of normal college-age, etc.) and the "normal" students at the college. She even goes as far as to list off historical and fictional characters, and whether or not they would be placed in the SSNoS program: "Mao Tse-tung? Yeah. I think mostly just because he was so fat, and he had rotten teeth." She acknowledges that she herself would have belonged in the program. Often she feels just as lost as her students, as they grasp for the words to translate their thoughts onto paper, and struggle with grammar. Though Mira mentions several times that she has a college degree, at one point she claims to be illiterate. As she witnesses the beauty and depth of her students' writing, she realizes these qualities in herself.

Throughout Love Me More are excerpts from Mira's childhood, which shadow her present life with a sense of inferiority. It is clear that Mira strives to "save" others - animals, children, her students - as a way of healing her childhood self. As she remembers and records more and more of her past, she begins to question the reality of her memory, and of the words she writes on the page: "What I know is true is different from what the page tells me." This explains a lot when applied to self image. What we know is true, the reality of our lives, is sometimes very different from our own negative self-image.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, and was very impressed by Ms. Goska's reading at Boxcar Books on February 6. It's wonderful to be able to read such an amazing book written by someone in my own community!

Let us now praise famous authors--and those authors who deserve to be famous, particularly Danusha Goska, author of "Love Me More: An Addict's Diary"! This novel-as-diary is about Miroswava Hudak, daughter and sister in a struggling, troubled Polish family, still new to America and about her direct, prolonged and courageous examination of her past and present. This novel doesn't follow familiar, expected formulae; it is more complex than any of them: the good guys may not always be so good and the bad guys may not always be so bad and maybe a little more effort all around at trying to understand other people would be a good idea. Though not everyone has Miraswava's experiences of world travel and of being a teacher, her diary deals with subjects and experiences many readers will recognize and recall from their own lives and readers can gain new insights and outlooks for themselves. Goska's novel is mainly about a specific character's experiences and responses but they will be of interest to readers of different (or not so different after all) backgrounds. "Love Me More: An Addict's Diary" lends itself exceptionally well to the medium of motion pictures and it is hoped that a film maker of respect and integrity will eventually translate Danusha Goska's book into a movie. Apart from Miraswava herself there are other characters that would be "dream roles" for many actresses and actors. "Love Me More: An Addict's Diary" is not short nor is it casual reading but it makes the reader think and consider and while it is an engrossing book it is also edifying and ennobling.

This remarkable book signals the entry of an extraordinary new talent in contemporary fiction. Goska has given us a fresh and honest perspective on class and ethnicity in the United States -- one of the most powerful explorations of these issues to appear since World War II. Her views are all the more remarkable given the prevailing piety about these issues at present. Along the way, she tosses off fascinating asides on the case history as a literary genre, popular tv sitcoms, sex, food . . . you name it. And she does it all in dazzling and madly inventive prose. This book is nothing short of amazing.

Fiction is sometimes needed to tell the most difficult truths. This book does that. It is a rare piece in that it describes the academic setting, and life within it and its value systems, from the perspective of a working class Slavic American. It also gives most first generation college students an idea of what life at the university might be like. While it probably would speak most strongly to a female reader, it still has a lot of value to the male reader. It also offers a view of what teaching might be like to prospective teachers. It would be great if there were more books out there that depicted life all of the various careers a kid could imagine doing, if only to let them know beforehand where they'd end up.

Goska is a writer possessed of (or maybe by) an enormous talent. She can be searing or funny or gentle, but her words are always compelling. This book sucked me in almost from the very beginning and it never turned me loose.

Even when the material itself is painful or difficult, the book's an easy read because it's so arfully handled that you don't want to put it down. It is an astonishing, powerful work.

I first read Danusha Goska's Love Me More when it initially came out in 2003, and what excited me about the book then was its energy. It reminded me of the writers I read and loved growing up, Jack Keruoac and Saul Bellow and Nelson Algren. It had that same sort of high-octane energy that drew you along and made you want to listen to a voice alternately whispering and screaming and laughing in your ear. I couldn't stop reading. Her voice was a Roman candle lighting up a night that sometimes was desperate and battered, and sometimes was as lonely and dark as a cold desert on a moonless night.

It was a book I admired and one that I've recommended to my friends.

Coming back to it after four years, I wasn't sure what I would find. The novel that goes off like a Roman candle seldom does it twice. You go back to Kerouac's On the Road after a handful of years and you wonder about who you were and why you responded so strongly to a novel that seems to be moving too slowly to finish. I imagine we've all had that experience, but I was happily surprised that Ms. Goska's novel is still the same strong and compelling and unique novel it was when I first read it.

It's the kind of book that's always surprising, full of insights and feelings and observations that always seem new.

I received this book for my 51st birthday. I kind of scoffed because one review said that she writes like James Joyce and the greats. Ha, I thought, such hyperbole.
Now, three days later I eat my words and my scoff. I couldn't put this book down. I am amazed at the power of the writing on a topic that I wasn't particularly interested in reading about. The images and words drew me in to a web of human understanding and drama. The writing is so seamless that I feel as though I learned a great deal about perspectives of ethnicity and teaching and addiction and pain and humor and abuse and overcoming and living essence v. triviality while swept up in the honesty of Mira's life but all the time I was entranced with the original style and incisive use of language.
In Danusha Goska we are witnessing one of the best writers of this generation. She has an authentic and artful voice that I hope will lead us as writers and readers to a new standard.

As I read Love Me More: An Addict's Story, I couldn't help but think that Knopf, St. Martin's, and A-list agents don't know what they're missing. They should be lined up, clamoring to represent Ms. Goska. This book is packed with exquisite prose, uniquely written.

Miroswava Hudak is a young woman of Polish descent, floundering to gather shattered remnants of herself into some understandable whole. Mira is sick to death of donning masquerades to survive, weary of pretense. All her life she's seen herself as others see her, been defined by cruel words and brutal actions. Regardless of her true size, she sees herself as fat. As a child, food fed the craving space inside her. As an adult, she denies that starveling child and searches for less fattening means of gaining nurture. Healthy sexuality is smothered by her fear of being seen for what she imagines her appearance to be. Exercise is helpful, but how much is too much? And then she finds her answer.

Words. Language. Thoughts and the expressing of them in her diary begins the reformation. Mira learns through writing to know, accept, and understand herself. And more, she learns forgiveness of past wrongs. In her role as instructor to low-functioning college students, her view of humaniity is enhanced and enlarged. The strength and understanding she gains feeds her students, and vice versa.

Miroswava Hudak is a delicious heroine. Her students are endearing - even the unappealing ones - and her family is sympathetically drawn despite their faults. Not every writer could pull off a book like this. Danusha Goska did, in spades, because she's an accomplished and intelligent wordsmith.