A moving memoir of a love affair with an addict, weaving personal reckoning with psychology and history to grapple with addiction, codependency and our appetite for obsessive love

'The disease he has is addiction,' Nina Renata Aron writes of her boyfriend. 'The disease I have is loving him.' Their affair is dramatic, urgent - an intoxicating antidote to the lonely days of early motherhood. But soon, K starts using again. Even as his addiction deepens, she stays, thinking she can save him. It's a familiar pattern, developed in an adolescence marred by family trauma - how can she break it? If she leaves, has she failed? In this unflinching memoir, Aron shows the devastating effect of addiction on loved ones. She also untangles the messy ties between her own history of enabling, society's expectations of womanhood and our ideas of love. She cracks open the feminised phenomenon of co-dependency, tracing its development from the formation of Al-Anon to recent research in the psychology of addiction, and asks uncomfortable questions about when help becomes harm, and when we choose to leave.

"Incredible ... so well written and loving that once you pick it up, you'll read it in a couple of sittings." - Stylist

"A bleak, brutal and brilliant account of the devastation addiction can wreak on a relationship" - i Paper

"This book is an essential read" - Washington Post

"Dark, gorgeously narrated" - Publishers Weekly

"A beautiful, nuanced portrait of living alongside addiction" - Booklist

"A scorching, unvarnished memoir" - EW

"This book is an essential read. It shows us that addicts are more than statistics, their co-dependents more than "snivelling, whimpering, and brokenhearted." These are real people, rendered by Aron with eye-opening complexity and dynamism. In this book, the underrepresented & overlooked world of the codependent emerges from the bargain basement of self-help and shopworn homilies into the realm of love and loathing, birth and death, blood and urine. Into the realm, in other words, of the literary." - Washington Post

"From the title to the final sentence, a wildly imaginative, feminine and feminist book with a palpable energetic power that feels as much incantation as memoir." - Your Voice in My Head

"Has given us language to feel the depth and devastations of love, to pay respect to the gnarled and beautiful ways we grow." - Know My Name

"A whip-smart addition to the literature of addiction and an intimate look at the beating heart of codependency. It's a propulsive story of empathy, desire, recklessness, and the things we risk for love-I couldn't put it down." - Black Light

"Aron's dark, gorgeously narrated memoir of destructive codependency will captivate readers." - Publishers Weekly

"In Aron's candid and heart-wrenching memoir, the gnarled knots of love and addiction are untied and tangled and tied again. ... A beautiful, nuanced portrait of living alongside addiction."" - Booklist (starred review)

"No matter what your relationship to addictive behavior might be, Aron offers a fresh and sometimes shocking perspective that has been sidelined since the beginning of the recovery movement. ... Whether she's describing her mental state...or the landscape of addiction ..., each page of Aron's memoir glints with hard-won truths." - LA Times

"'Incredible ... This is also a deeply feminist book that highlights the patriarchal structures that keep women in such damaging relationships. If this all sounds heavy - it is - but it's so well written and loving that once you pick it up, you'll read it in a couple of sittings.'" - Stylist

"[A] scorching, unvarnished memoir" - Entertainment Weekly

"Unflinching...Aron writes in gripping prose about the thrills and dangers of her own substance use and relationship with K - their weak-kneed passion and wolfish needs, as well as her guilt-ridden enabling and savior-complex optimism." - San Francisco Chronicle