RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books\"Coulter’s essays are short, smart, and with the heart that the (mostly male) addiction stories seem to miss. You know, the sad, serious boys, the John Barleycorn dreamers, or those lost souls who tell of rock bottom and redemption ... Coulter uses formal experimentation to write about recovery standards that could become cliché in a lesser writer — running after quitting, a riff on a Mary Oliver poem, an account of her favorite booze over the years. Even the tale of Coulter’s journey to the first AA meeting is full of surprises ... Unlike recovery stories that require epiphanies, and come equipped with insider language and bravado, Coulter shows the slow, painful walk out of addiction and into recovery ... Coulter proves that our stories can be as complicated and powerful as we are.\
Rob Roberge
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...the structure of the book, with its brisk, dark, cycling vignettes, doesn’t just mimic the way we actually remember; it imposes a felt sense of bipolar disorder, a diagnosis which Roberge first received in the 1980s. It makes sense that this is the form in which Roberge is best able to try and make sense of his world. He may be held up as the rock star hero/antihero in the publicity surrounding this work, but his is not a confessional, personality-driven memoir without concern for larger questions about history and agency.
