STRAY

A writer’s memoir of familial dysfunction and addiction.

Despite the breakthrough success of her debut novel, Sweetbitter (2016), Danler's life remained very much up in the air in her early 30s. Her mother was an alcoholic and never quite recovered from a brain aneurysm that nearly killed her. The author's father was a drug addict, frequently relapsing and largely unemployable. He had left the household when she was a toddler, and she had lived with her increasingly alcoholic and abusive mother until she was 16, when she was shipped to the father, who provided no supervision. In college and early adulthood, Danler did all she could to sever ties with both of them and entered a marriage that seemed doomed from the start. She cheated on him, and when the marriage ended, she explained to her friend Carly, “I just want more....Once Carly figured out that I was self-destructing with no plan, nerves frayed by lust, she was concerned." Will this “stray" ever find some sort of stability? “There is nothing falser to me than a story that ends with catharsis,” she writes. “Loving liars, addicts, or people who abuse your love is a common affliction....No one taught us how to trust the world, or that we could, so we trust no one. We’ve never developed a sense of self.” Danler's first memoir is as well-written as her novel was, but it can be as frustrating for readers as it was for her friends and family—indeed, as it was for the author herself—to watch her going back and forth with the married lover she calls the “Monster,” with whom she ended things for good countless times. She seems to have a more stable, somewhat tepid relationship with another man, referred to as “the Love Interest.” Toward the end, she tells herself, “You have to make a change,” and perhaps she will.

A mostly moving text in which writing is therapeutic and family trauma is useful material. Most readers will root for Danler.