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Paperback: 336 pages Publisher: Vintage (April 11 2000) Costumer Rating:  Read an Excerpt Part One Book Description In the tradition of Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted and Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story, Mary Allen tells a riveting love story that explores the uncharted territory between passion and addiction, grief and madness, this world and the next. When Mary Allen falls in love with Jim Beaman, she doesn't know he has a drug problem, but she does sense demons and angels around him, like "a disturbance in the air, a sound just beyond the register of human hearing." And when Jim—discouraged and depressed, struggling with his addiction—kills himself a year into their relationship, Allen is unable to let him go. In her desperate attempts to recover from the loss, she uses a Ouija board and automatic writing to pull back from reality into the dark recesses of her mind, where she believes she can find him. The result is a mesmerizing trip across the boundaries between this world and the afterlife, a journey that leads her to the brink of insanity and ultimately back to herself. About the Author
Mary Allen received an MFA in fiction in 1988 from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of The Rooms of Heaven, published in hardcover in 1999 by Alfred A. Knopf and in paperback in 2000 by Vintage Books. She has published non-fiction articles in Real Simple and Library Journal, short stories in Shenandoah and Beloit Fiction Journal, and poetry in The Spoon River Poetry Review. » More by Mary Allen | |||||||
Mary Allen