Review: A Good Hard Look in the Mirror
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 22, 2012
This is a memoir that will make you laugh and cry. It might make you remember your childhood, or your parents, or some people you knew, or the craziest thing you ever did. Like every good memoir, there is an emphasis on gazing into the mirror, and what the author sees there is not pretty.The book depicts with stark realism what it is like to start drinking alcohol in the morning, every morning, and not stop until you have passed out late at night. Add in to the mix every sort of drug you can think of, and driving around in cars, and having sex. Everything else takes a back seat: food, relationships, family, love. That story has been told many times, but what makes this memoir different is the writing. Erik Christian is a poet, with a crisp, clean voice and a keen eye for detail.What also stands out is the powerful contrast between the narrator's feeling at rock bottom that he has no friends and has never had any friends, and the reality that throughout the twenty years that pass in the story he makes deep and lasting friendships. Without those friends, he would clearly be dead. The other people in his life may have their own selfish needs, and use him as much as he uses them. But there sure is a lot of that going around, if perhaps in a slightly less toxic form. Erik Christian is telling an important story.The Drunk reminded me of the obsessive nihilist tone of Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero - although, unlike the protagonist in that novel, this narrator is only into destroying himself. Also Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney. The Drunk is an equally stellar performance. The book has hit the big time with numerous spelling errors, for which I deduct a star. IMHO big publishers should take note: this book has star quality, and the travesty is not the editing, it's that it hasn't found its way to Madison Avenue. Yet.