Gone to the Crazies: A Memoir - Hardcover

Weaver, Alison

3.33

326 ratings by Goodreads

9780061189586: Gone to the Crazies: A Memoir

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061189588 ISBN 13: 9780061189586

Publisher: Harper, 2007

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As a child, Alison Weaver's life shone with surface-level perfection—full of nannies, private schools, and ballet lessons. She had all the luxuries of a wealthy Manhattan upbringing, and all the makings of a perfect Upper East Side miss. But her childhood memories were laced with darker undertones: Her father was emotionally absent, unable to engage in problems that couldn't be solved with clean lines and simple plans, and her mother was a beautiful, aloof alcoholic. Neither parent approved of their daughter's outbursts and emotions—and in the midst of her parents' own flaws, Weaver was constantly reminded that she was a mess that needed fixing.

By the time she was a teenager, Weaver had found escape in alcohol, marijuana, and late-night abandon. But when her exasperated parents had her shipped away—in handcuffs—to the cultish Cascade School, everything changed. Within the surreal isolation of the school's mountain campus, she left her old self behind, warping into a brainwashed model of Cascade's mottos and ideals. Graduation two years later left her unprepared for the harshness of the real world—and she soon fell back into a mind-numbing wash of drugs. Stum-bling into freefall in New York's East Village in the 1990s, Weaver's life began a downward spiral marked by needles and late-night parties, mingled with fears of HIV and death. Ultimately, faced with the reality of her rapidly escalating self-destruction, Weaver was forced to face her inner darkness head on.

Gone to the Crazies proves the age-old adage: You can't come clean until you've hit rock bottom. By turns wry, heartbreaking, and emotionally intense, Alison Weaver's mesmerizing debut fascinates with its vivid depiction of the bonds between family and friends, and the thoughtful exploration of what it means to fight for identity and equilibrium.

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About the Author:

Alison Weaver is copublisher of the literary journal H.O.W., the proceeds of which go to needy orphans worldwide. Her work has appeared in Small Spiral Notebook, Opium magazine, Red China, and the Fifth Street Review.

From Publishers Weekly:

To be fair, Weaver's entry into the family dysfunction/drug abuse/road to recovery memoir pool is engaging on a voyeuristic level; unfortunately, insanity and addiction have been staples of the genre since The Bell Jar, and Weaver's doesn't contribute much to the tradition. Beginning with her privileged New York-Connecticut upbringing, Weaver gives her girlhood self a hard-to-swallow existentialist streak, as in her description of a Fifth Avenue Christmas party: "The nothingness of it all hit me as I stood alone in the corner... like a painting covered in too much varnish, the top layer began to peel away, and in a flash I saw the dark and frightening emptiness that lay below the color." Faced with all that emptiness, wealth and domestic instability (alcoholic mother, distant father), Weaver drinks, smokes pot and gets kicked out of prestigious Spence School. Eventually she ends up at $100,000-a-year rehab boarding school Cascade, which turns out to be more cult than cure. After graduation, Weaver resorts to old tricks, drugging and slumming through New York's Lower East Side, discovering Ketamine and getting arrested on the road to redemption. Though there's plenty of honesty here, and an interesting look inside the bizarre world of high-end juvenile rehab, too much of the action and self-reflection are both familiar and overwrought.
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