Don't Go Crazy Without Me

by Deborah A. Lott

Overview

Don’t Go Crazy Without Me tells the tragicomic coming of age story of a girl who grew up under the seductive sway of her outrageously eccentric father. He taught her how to have fun; he also taught her to fear food poisoning, other children’s infectious diseases, and the contaminating propensities of the world at large. Alienated from her emotionally distant mother, the girl bonded closely with her father and his worldview. When he plunged from neurotic to full-blown psychotic, she nearly followed him. Sanity is not always a choice, but for the sixteen-year-old, decisions had to be made and lines drawn between reality and what her mother called her “overactive imagination.” She would have to give up beliefs carried by the infectious agent of her father’s love.

Saving herself would require an unconventional reading of Moby Dick, sexual pleasure in the body that had confounded her, and entry into the larger world of political activism as a volunteer in Robert F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign. After attending his last stop at the Ambassador Hotel the night of his assassination, she would come to a new reckoning with loss and with engagement beyond the confines of her family. Ultimately, she would find a way to turn her grief into love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597098151
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Deborah A. Lott ’s memoirs, essays, and reportage have been published in the Rumpus, Salon, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellingham Review, Black Warrior Review, Cimarron Review, the Los Angeles Times, StoryQuarterly, the Good Men Project, the nervous breakdown, and many other places. Her family’s legacy of hypochondria was featured on NPR’s This American Life. Her first book, In Session: the Bond between Women and their Therapists, offered an unprecedented look at psychotherapy from the perspective of clients interviewed by the author. Her essays have been thrice named as “notables of the year” by Best American Essays. She teaches creative writing and literature at Antioch University, Los Angeles, where she serves as faculty advisor to Two Hawks Quarterly.com. She lives with her husband, Gary Edelstone, in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Prologue:

Present, UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute 9

Tuesday, 1:00 p.m.

1968, UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute 11

Memory Lessons

1 Gotchernose 19

Present, Bedroom, Midnight 28

2 Flipped 30

Present, Bedroom, 2:30 a.m. 43

3 My Bad Habit 45

4 The Kindergarten Papers 56

Present, Kitchen, 9:00 a.m. 66

5 Storytellers 68

6 Migraine 77

Present, Dining Room, Sunday, 6:00 p.m. 89

Invasive Maneuvers

7 Remodel 95

8 Party Crasher 115

9 Perfectly Empty 121

Present, Dining Room, Saturday, 2:00 p.m. 133

10 Pigeon Drop 137

Four Fathoms Five

11 Screw Nature 149

12 Buffers 158

13 Folie à Deux 173

14 Grief Fails to Stop Time 186

15 Conspiracy Theories 199

Present, Restaurant, Santa Monica, 1:00 p.m. 214

16 A Line Drawn 217

17 Visiting Hours 229

Present, Living Room, Sunday, 3:00 p.m. 245

18 Released 251

Editorial Reviews

Deborah A. Lott’s Don’t Go Crazy Without Me is funny, horrifying, and heartbreaking—and often surprisingly, all three at once. It’s an astonishingly vivid book, and to read it is to be caught up, just as the writer was, in an impossible, crazy, misfit family. Through grace and nerve and will, Deborah learns that you can’t “screw nature,” or “stop time,” as her father tried to do, “but you could turn your grief into love.” This writer’s love for her deeply screwed-up family is unforgettable. As the best memoirs do, Don’t Go Crazy Without Me makes this writer’s story belong to all of us.
—Mark Doty, National Book Award Winner, author of the memoirs Firebird, Dog Years, Heaven’s Coast, and multiple volumes of poetry.

Don’t Go Crazy Without Me is an extraordinary book. Deborah A. Lott writes about everything—parents, children, bodies, illness, sex, writing—with a voice that is utterly clear and beautiful and funny and original. This is a book written with honesty that will both break your heart and enlarge it.
—Karen E. Bender, National Book Award Finalist and author of A Town of Empty Rooms, Refund, and Like Normal People.

Hilarious, devastating, and compassionate: Deborah A. Lott’s Don’t Go Crazy Without Me is written with a ferocious intelligence; it pulverizes memoir as we knew it. This is glorious work by a writer working at the height of her power.
—Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door and Lawnboy

Sentence by sentence, Deborah A. Lott is one of the finest writers I know. Her keen insights into the dynamics of her quirky, unforgettable family, and into family dynamics in general, make this book bound to be a classic.
—Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters

Brilliantly written with grace, generosity, and a highly refined sense of the absurd, Don’t Go Crazy Without Me is the harrowing account of a chaotic, bewildering childhood. This reader was enthralled from the get-go, and Deborah A. Lott is now one of my favorite writers—I kiss the hem of her garment.
—Abigail Thomas, author of Safekeeping, Three Dog Night, and What Comes Next and How to Like It

From the Publisher

2019-12-15
A daughter grows up in the whirlwind of her overbearing father.

Once misdiagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Lott (Creative Writing/Antioch Univ., Los Angeles; In Session: The Bond Between Women and Their Therapists, 1999) recounts growing up with a father whose craziness seemed infectious. "My father and I were not ordinary," writes the author; "oh no, we had formed an alliance around being extraordinary." In Lott's noisily dysfunctional family, she and her father, Ira, bonded against her mother and brothers, who thought Ira was irritating, infuriating, and more than a little eccentric. Ira coveted his daughter's attentions, making her his confidante, flattering her looks and talent. She was a genius, he insisted, and he would gain fame and fortune as the genius father of a child prodigy. Lott adored him, even when he treated her "like an adult playmate, like a collaborator." She refused to see him as others did: a bizarre neurotic. Usually wearing nothing but underwear, Ira was a jokester, an exhibitionist, and a narcissist who hogged the center of attention. He was also a hypochondriac, intensely focused on what he thought were symptoms of dire diseases and hypersensitive "to any minor shift in the environment." While Ira complained with "operatic intensity" about various physical ailments, the children strived to get their mother's attention by complaining even more loudly: of severe allergic reactions, mysterious rashes, and rare strains of salmonella, despite Ira's "relentless attempts to protect us from food poisoning." Ira did have some serious health problems, including asthma, borderline diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity; through the years, he became addicted to painkillers and sleeping pills, supplied by "a sympathetic and equally addicted local pharmacist." After his mother died, Ira descended into depression, refusing to shower, shave, get dressed, work, or eat anything but "soft foods suitable to a toddler's palate." He became obsessed with death and dying, and since Lott was viscerally in tune to his needs, she became obsessed, too, pushed almost to the brink of sanity.

A candid, unsettling family portrait of madness and enduring love.

Kirkus Reviews