GOOD MORNING, DESTROYER OF MEN'S SOULS

An Oakland-based writer and editor tells the story of a passionate but co-dependent long-term affair that ended her marriage and became the “disease” that nearly destroyed her.

Aron was a teenager just out of high school when she first met K, a man in his 20s, in San Francisco. Newly arrived from New Jersey, she had come to California to “[collect] experiences” and escape a home life that, though loving, had also become chaotic. Their romance, which K ended, lasted only a few months, but it left her feeling “sick with [a] love” she never forgot. Aron eventually returned to the East Coast to attend college and deal with the fallout surrounding a drug-addicted sister and a mother who could not disconnect from that sister’s dramas. She then went to graduate school at Harvard, where she met the “tawny, rangy, beautiful boy” who became her partner. They moved to Berkeley, where they married and had a son. Yet despite her good fortune, the author could not “outrun my own sadness,” much of which stemmed from witnessing people she loved struggle with addiction and codependence. Diagnosed with both major depressive disorder and dysthymia, she found herself forced to confront the fact that marriage had transformed “hot, young, carefree love” into a prison. As she desperately attempted to understand and embrace her life, K suddenly reappeared, this time on Facebook, and they began a friendship that quickly developed into an affair. Discovering she was pregnant, Aron tried and ultimately failed to reconcile with her husband. She and K then began a relationship in which she soon found herself not only fighting with him about substance abuse problems, but sometimes partaking in and even funding K’s addictions. Interwoven throughout with meditations on desire, caretaking, and the role of early feminists like Carrie Nation in the modern temperance movement, the narrative offers dramatic and compelling insight into Aron’s struggles with codependency as it complicates the relationship among femininity, feminism, and enabling.

A raw and eloquently unflinching memoir.