The Rooms of Heaven (Hardcover)

by Mary Allen (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Although this is billed as a memoir, a more accurate label might be spiritual autobiography. After Mary Allen's drug-addicted boyfriend, Jim, commits suicide, she enters the classic dark night of the soul, confronting the denials as well as the truths that existed prior to her beloved's suicide. A less courageous author might have stopped there, but Allen has the guts also to reveal her mental anguish and psychiatric institutionalization. She delved into the underworld of the afterlife, desperate for connection with her boyfriend's spirit.

Although Allen does not dismiss the possibility of "Summerland," a spiritualist term for the afterlife, she stays grounded in her personal experience with contacting Jim's spirit, instead of making sweeping assertions about the hereafter. The effect is engrossing and at times laugh-aloud funny. Overall, Allen's narrative rings with dignity--clearly the voice of an accomplished, award-winning writer as well as a woman who has risen from the ashes of a lover's suicide and codependency (a cliché she skillfully avoids lingering over) to become a person who can finally love with ferocity and self-respect intact. --Gail Hudson

From Publishers Weekly
Allen's memoir is both confessional and therapeutic in tone. It begins in the summer of 1989, when she was employed as an editor in Iowa City and fell in love with Jim Beaman, a neighbor who worked in construction. Allen details the first blissful months of her relationship with Beaman and then charts how it all fell apart because of his inability to kick an intravenous cocaine habit. Despite Allen's efforts to deny the seriousness of Beaman's drug problem, his hospitalization after a binge, his abusive language and wild mood swings forced her to face the hopeless nature of his addiction, which ended with his suicide the following January. Allen describes her astonishing behavior during the months following Beaman's death, when, driven by an obsessive desire to contact her dead lover in the afterlife, she conducted experiments with a Ouija board. These led her to fill notebooks with automatic writing,characterized by meaningless squiggles that she believed were conversations with Beaman and other spirits. Eventually, Allen consented to a short, voluntary commitment to a psychiatric ward, where she was given lithium. She looks back on that period as necessary to her grieving and, although no longer beset by communications from the spirit world, does not discount the existence of an afterlife. Despite the subtitle, Allen doesn't go off the deep end in her treatment of an afterlife. Most of the book deals with her relationship with Beaman, which Allen renders in prose that's long on lyricism and descriptive virtuosity but short on psychological insight into either herself or her lover. 50,000 first printing.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 319 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (January 19, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679454608
• ISBN-13: 978-0679454601
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,059,734 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No New Age Nonsense Here!, July 21, 1999

By A Customer

Mary Allen has written an important book about drug addiction, its effect on the life of not just the addict, and how "co-dependency" makes it all that much "easier" for the addict and those are closest to the addict, continue on their destructive paths. Then Ms. Allen describes to us her own brief visit into the realm of mental illness and her obsessive search for what ever remains of her ill-starred love, Jim Beaman, as a spirit or "shade". To have revealed as much as Ms. Allen has about her own problems took a great deal of courage, I think. If the reader is looking for a lot of "New Age" nonsense about the afterlife and her experiences in attempting to contact the spirit of Jim Beaman, you won't find it here! If Ms. Allen is anything at all, it's thoughtful and level-headed. She is not prone to flights of New Age fancy . But she does show us just how ephemeral the human spirit can be. I can't recommend this book too highly. It may not "satisfy" the "sensationalist seeking" reader fixated on learning all the "nuts and bolts" of Ms. Allen's attempts at after-death communication with the shade of her deceased lover, and just how successful she was. But this book was never intended to be that kind of book. It was written in a "literary style", it raises importatant questions of human spirituality, and is as "down-to-earth" as Ms. Allens' adopted Iowa.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A sad and very open story, May 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Rooms of Heaven : A Story of Love, Death, Grief, and the Afterlife (Paperback)

Mary Allen has written a very candid account of her love affair with an alcoholic cocaine addict that is, at times, so unguarded as to be embarassing. Why doesn't this intelligent, articulate woman take charge of her life and relationship? Love, and all of the inexplicable things it leads us to do, is the answer. I was engrossed by the first part of the book wherein Mary recounted the love affair and eventual suicide of Jim. The second half of the book, in which she recounts her search for answers rang true to me, as the surviver of a loved one's suicide, but was ultimately (and inevitably) unsatisfying. There are no answers out there.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I read a lot. This is one of my favorite books of all time., July 26, 1999

By A Customer

Mary Allen is a master. I am Jim Beaman, to great extent. I am addicted to most anything I like, and I KNOW how the PULL of the demons feels. Mary captures that...she knows it, as she was addicted to the addictive personality. She loved him. It shows. As does her aching, crying grief. And every point of human emotion along the wide scale. Her love of Iowa...and the University, and writing...all come to life, in this tale of death, despair...and return, recovery. Jim Beaman loved you, Mary. I do too.