Her Story bookclub is reading "Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls" by Nina Renata Aron

Her Story is a bookclub that meets at Hub City Bookshop on the first (and sometimes second!) Wednesday of each month to discuss books about women, by women. Meet us on Zoom for our virtual bookclub on August 5th to discuss "Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls." Bookclub will begin at 6 p.m. Enjoy reading!

Sign up here!

Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love by Nina Renata Aron

A scorching memoir of a love affair with an addict, weaving personal reckoning with psychology and history to understand the nature of addiction, codependency, and our appetite for obsessive love.

“The disease he has is addiction,” Nina Renata Aron writes of her boyfriend, K. “The disease I have is loving him.” Their love affair is dramatic, urgent, overwhelming—an intoxicating antidote to the long, lonely days of early motherhood. Soon after they get together, K starts using again, and years of relapses and broken promises follow. Even as his addiction deepens, she stays, convinced she is the one who can get him sober. After an adolescence marred by family trauma and addiction, Nina can’t help but feel responsible for those suffering around her. How can she break this pattern? If she leaves K, has she failed him?

“Aron has expertly examined and reframed the traditional patriarchal structure of recovery literature, incorporating her own raw and gorgeously rendered story. Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls is for anyone touched by addiction, which is all of us. It is a stunning interrogation of family and love and what it means to lose yourself in another. At turns wild and punk rock, redemptive and heartfelt, this book feels like the book I’ve always been looking for.”—Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot

Writing in prose at once unflinching and acrobatic, Aron delivers a piercing memoir of romance and addiction, drawing on intimate anecdotes as well as academic research to crack open the long-feminized and overlooked phenomenon of codependency. She shifts between visceral, ferocious accounts of her affair with K and introspective analyses of the part she plays in his addictions, as well as defining moments in the history of codependency, from the temperance movement to the formation of Al-Anon to more recent research in the psychology of addiction. Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls is a blazing, bighearted book that illuminates and adds nuance to the messy tethers between femininity, enabling, and love.

“In Aron’s candid and heart-wrenching memoir, the gnarled knots of love and addiction are untied and tangled and tied again. . . . Her compassion for victims of addiction never wavers, and her presentation of the addicted people in her life is dynamic and fair. A beautiful, nuanced portrait of living alongside addiction.”—Booklist (starred review)

Nina Renata Aron is a writer and editor living in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Coming up...

September 2020

The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd