The Reading List wishes this week to share with you what is surely the book review of the year. It comes from Publisher’s Weekly, the bible of the industry, whose short reviews are usually the first a book receives. This is for a tome entitled First Comes Love, by Marion Winik, in bookstores next month:
“National Public Radio commentator Winik’s memoir will appeal primarily to romantics who believe in the primacy of love and who can empathize with a woman whose husband in a rocky marriage committed suicide. More realistic types will wonder why Winik, although a heavy drug user at the time, allowed herself to be courted by a flamboyant homosexual junkie; she was subsequently to learn that he had been HIV-positive for two or three years before they met. They married in 1986 in Manhattan. Tony Heubach, a former ice-dancer, was a considerate person, although after the couple had two sons, his interest in heterosexual relations waned and the marriage began to unravel. His drug use increased sharply and, as his HIV turned into AIDS, his addiction became alarming: periods of catatonia alternated with prolonged sessions of weeping and, on a few occasions, assaults on his wife. With pain so acute and constant that even morphine was minimally effective, he requested her help to end his life. She prepared the bowl of strawberry-banana yogurt with 60 capsules of Nembutal that killed him in 1994.”
Hoo boy! There’s a story we can all relate to. Usually, marriages between heavy drug users, one of whom is a flamboyant homosexual, that lead to assisted suicide come under the heading, “I’m so ashamed ! could crawl into a hole and die.” Not Marion Winik’s, though; she obviously felt the need to ensure that her two sons get teased regularly as they journey through grade school and high school.
But the blurb does put us in mind of remarkable works by people who spent some considerable time in, shall we say, altered states of consciousness:
Kubla Khan, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The greatest opium dream ever put to paper. “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan his stately pleasure dome decree … ”
The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud. Maybe it took a one-time cocaine addict to see the logic in the dream state. Then again, maybe he was wrong.
