Many of Aron’s truths are so pulverizing in their honesty that they ought to come with a warning, especially for readers new to the gritty realities of recovery ... But there’s more to this memoir than doomed romance ... Despite her blunt, brutal tone, Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls is not a confessional ... Aron’s hatchet is the sharp prose she uses to slash through broken promises and empty apologies. Whether she’s describing her mental state...or the landscape of addiction...each page of Aron’s memoir glints with hard-won truths ... Aron lights a path through the darkness of her past toward a better future.
... stunning. I came to it as a reader with extensive experience with addiction and codependency; reading it was like a first sip of water after a 20-mile run in the heat. Aron is not only a master of metaphor but also a brilliant researcher who braids the story of a romantic life lost to codependency with a variety of other texts ... If you’ve been an addict or loved an addict, Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls will enter your bloodstream and overtake your mind in the most serious way. But even if you have no experience with addiction or codependency, this book is an essential read. It shows us that addicts are more than statistics, their codependents more than 'sniveling, whimpering, and brokenhearted.' These are real people, rendered by Aron with eye-opening complexity and dynamism. In this book, the underrepresented and 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 ... Here we see that women can not only minister to addicts but be addicts themselves, and that the whole messy, dangerous, love-bound struggle is more common than one might think. There is a war of attrition being waged by addiction and codependency against millions of American souls, and Aron’s memoir is a powerful strike back.
If 'co-dependency is a girl’s song,' as Nina Renata Aron writes, her scorching memoir proves it can be a beautiful one, too ... Aron details the spiral, of screaming matches and vomit and things thrown across rooms. It’s her side, the nagger, the enabler, told in a rich, intense, hard package — a gritty tribute to the women who stick around too long.
... brilliant ... Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls grabs you right from its wonderful title and doesn’t let go ... the reader will want to know why she stays with [an addict]. The book not only answers this question but does so in scenes that surprise right from the beginning of Nina’s story ... temperance movement...interludes are well chosen and interesting, particularly the passages from wives of alcoholics who are sick of being seen as enablers, or as adjuncts to their problematic husbands rather than as people in their own right ... She is a deft writer whose memoir reads like fiction—colourful details, elliptical dialogue, twists and turns, the relentless needs of the characters ... Aron is brutally self-aware ... But in telling the story of a codependent, her other great success is to humanise the addict.
... candid and heart-wrenching ... Aron revisits old wounds with clarity and care. Her compassion for victims of addiction never wavers, and her presentation of the addicted people in her life is dynamic and fair. A beautiful, nuanced portrait of living alongside addiction.
... captivating ... passionate and heartbreaking ... Research related to the psychology of addiction, the gendered nature of codependency, the women involved in the temperance movement, and a brief history of Al-Anon are interwoven with Aron’s personal story. These sections inform and enhance the work; however, they would have been much more valuable, especially to researchers, had there been notes providing complete citations for the sourced information ... Overall, this compelling portrait of addiction, intense love, and codependency should captivate many readers.
... a disturbing, richly conveyed story of dysfunction and warped love ... Aron spellbindingly details her thirst for mayhem and her fixation on K—who depleted her bank account and was physically abusive—around whom her own drinking escalated ... Aron’s dark, gorgeously narrated memoir of destructive codependency will captivate readers.
Interwoven throughout with meditations on desire, caretaking, and the role of early feminists like Carrie Nation in the modern temperance movement, the narrative offers dramatic and compelling insight into Aron’s struggles with codependency as it complicates the relationship among femininity, feminism, and enabling ... A raw and eloquently unflinching memoir.
