THE ART OF LOSING IT

A debut memoir chronicles a woman’s struggles with alcoholism and drug abuse.

In January 1991, former Toronto TV news reporter Keevil was living in Vancouver with her husband, Barry, a successful lawyer. They had two children, 2-year-old Dixie and 4-year-old Willow, and were building a large vacation home in Whistler, British Columbia. And then Barry began experiencing serious pain in his knee and leg. In the middle of the night before his scheduled series of comprehensive tests, the author received a phone call from her mother in Toronto. Her older brother, Rob Parr, had been found unconscious in his Vancouver apartment. She drove to the emergency room. By February, Barry had been diagnosed with aggressive “T-cell immunoblastic non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.” Rob had developed AIDS and was gradually dying. Part 1 of the memoir is so sad it is sometimes difficult to read. In emotional prose, Keevil describes in detail the months of tests, surgeries, and chemotherapy Barry endured to prolong his life. Simultaneously, the author was responsible for overseeing Rob’s care. There are passages that recount how she was hectically driving back and forth between the two hospitals. Every evening seemed to end with one, two, or three large glasses of white wine, signaling the problems that lay ahead. Part 2 fast-forwards to April 2002. As much as the first half of the painfully candid memoir is heart-rending, the beginning of the second half is terrifying. Keevil’s drinking was out of control. She commonly mixed alcohol with prescription drugs and, for a while, cocaine. One riveting section describes her driving Dixie home from school on the wrong side of the highway. Fortunately, she placed herself in a rehab facility. The author, who is working as a reporter again, writes with a novelist’s sense of drama. She deftly conveys the seductive comfort she found in her addictions despite the physical and emotional hangovers that inevitably followed: “Ahhhh...I feel such relief as I gulp down a glass of the nice, light French chardonnay. It’s a perfect breakfast wine.”

A raw, honest, and unsettling account lifted by flashes of humor and an ultimate victory.