While focused on drug and alcohol addiction, this book also tackles the complicated topic of codependency which feels relevant to lots of people whether they love a person struggling with addiction or not. There is also a rich history about the founding and beliefs of AA and Al-Anon which I enjoyed, but not nearly as much as I did Aron's personal reflections.

I appreciated that Aron didn't deflect from her own negative contributions to her chaotic lifestyle; she wrote with unflinching honesty and vulnerability. There were times I wanted to reach back in time to shake her awake and to yell at her to stop destroying her own life! But I was also quickly reminded how difficult it is to leave a codependent relationship - regardless of how aware one is of it's toxicity.

While I think Aron included the anecdotes about AA and Al-Anon, I could have done without them as it changed the style of her writing. During those sections, it felt a little too academic for my liking and I found myself losing focus. Other than that minor complaint, I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir and think it could make a great book club selection!

This book was truly excellent. It has given me therapy fodder for years, even as someone who does not have a history of addition in my family. Nina Renata Aron has told a truly immersive and thought-provoking story. I highlighted almost the whole thing and will be thinking about this book for a while.

I have read several books on the topic of addiction. This book is unique in that the author focuses on co-dependency. She delves into her life growing up with a sister that was addicted to heroin. She learns early about codependency as her mother and her fill that role for their sister. Her early experience makes it clear that there is a very fine line between loving and not giving up on someone verses enabling them. As she looks back on her early years she can see the effects that her relationship had on her such as over drinking, depression and ultimately even her romantic relationships. The heart of her story of course is her relationship and marriage to her husband whom she calls K. I like that she takes the reader back to when they met so you understand how and why she choose him. As a reader I could truly understand her conflict of knowing she should leave but not wanting to give up hope. She does such a good job of peeling back the layers that I could feel her pain, confusion and passion. Very moving contemplative read.

An engaging story, but I don’t feel that our readership would be drawn to this one. We have a bit of trouble pushing memoirs.

Nina Renata Aron's Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls was, for me, a deeply affecting book. More than a memoir of codependency, its narrative encompasses themes of love, family and self-actualization, woven together with honesty, tenderness and frank but gorgeous prose.

As is noted in the blurbs and other reviews, the linchpin of the book is Aron's codependent relationship with her addicted lover, K. Our understanding of this relationship is framed in the context of Aron's upbringing. She paints a vivid portrait her older sister, Lucia, who also experienced addiction. I found Lucia to be one of the most compelling characters in the book, the result of Aron's deftly detailing the charismatic parts of Lucia's personality, the magnetic as well as the repellant. Another character who informed Aron's journey is her Nanny, and one of the most poignant parts of the book is when her Nanny described what happened the last evening her husband (Aron's grandfather) was alive. Without spoiling it, I will say that I wept openly, viewing this as a beautiful communication between two souls who knew what was to come, even though their minds did not.

Aron also offers us a compelling--though maddeningly incomplete--view of K. Perhaps this was intentional; perhaps it speaks to the fact that, even after more than a decade of loving him, his depths and inner workings were still a mystery to her (as is the case for many--most?--of our relationships). Even the endpoint of his narrative is ambiguous.

What is NOT ambiguous is Aron's journey into a greater understanding of herself. She states in the book that she does not believe in God, yet to me the heart of this book is her spiritual journey from aspects of self-loathing to the belief (soul understanding) that she deserves love and joy, and that one can't truly receive them from others until one gives them to oneself. Many of life's experiences and lessons exist to make us aware of this: Ultimately, love is ALL that matters--unconditional love of others, and of self.

This book will be of great interest, I suspect, to those who are or have navigated the codependent waters. But the material supersedes that audience; it is a moving tour de force of a story about one woman's journey into discovering herself, a journey that intersects and connects intimately with the paths each of us walks. A beautiful work.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC.

Hard to read in the best of ways, this book carries you along through the depths and heights of an impossible relationship. It's painful but brutally honest, and it made a perfect escapist read during these crazy times, I can't wait to share it.

Raw and super honest. Read this book into sittings – couldn’t put it down. One of the most beautiful memoirs I’ve read in a long time.

Nina Renata Aron's Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls is an absolute mind fuck, and I mean that in the best possible way. While the memoir is centered around Aron's close proximity to addiction and an exploration of her codependency within those relationships, it quickly becomes a larger treatise on womanhood, upbringing, sexism, and what it truly means to love another person in a patriarchal world.

Is love passive or is it active? Is love about mundane daily life or once-in-a-lifetime moments that take your breath away? How do we love people who aren't able to properly love themselves or us, and are they worth our sacrifice? For someone facing issues with people-pleasing or codependency, the answers aren't so simple. There's an elevated rawness to Aron's words and her slow unpacking of her history and these questions that's honestly rare in memoirs—and even addiction-related memoirs. There's no performance or righteousness, only her painful truth.

Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls is required reading, and I guarantee you'll stew in your own thoughts and emotions and memories for days (if not weeks) afterwards. I can already tell this is a book I'm going to revisit for years to come, and I'll find something new in it at every stage of life. I feel lucky to have read this memoir, even if I'm mentally overheated at the moment.

I was sent a review galley of Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls by Nina Renata Aron. The title immediately interested me and the beautiful cover drew my eye, as it is even more impressive in color. This is a memoir about love, addiction, codependency, and women.

If you’ve heard one addict story, you’ve heard a thousand; man made homeless from his drug problem gets clean and makes his fortune, teens stealing from their parent’s purse to fund their habits, people finding their loved ones cold and blue after an overdose. There’s a million stories with a variety of endings. The public is fascinated with the stories of addicts (that’s not to say that the public is enamored with HELPING addicts, just poking and prodding them for their “journey”). What we hear about less, is the perspective of the loved ones of addicts. You might hear a testimonial here and there, but we rarely get into how deeply one’s life is affected by loving and taking care of an addict. Nina makes a comment about how the family members are just usually just seen as supporting cast in the story. I think this is an important narrative that she brings to light. Aren’t their lives torn apart? Aren’t they affected by depression, by the money drain that comes with taking care of an addict, by the instability and havoc that an addict can impose upon their lives? They are working, cleaning, nurturing, and worrying while the throes of addiction grasp the person that they love.

In Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls, Nina highlights her childhood, where she was forced to take on the responsibility of an adult at a young age in the midst of her parents’ divorce and her sister’s growing addiction to drugs. She watched her mom date and nurture a drug addict for close to a decade after her father. This habit of nurturing an addict, which seems to have been psychologically instilled into her at a young age, follows her into her adulthood. She reunites with an old flame and is absolutely consumed by him. Nina is very honest with us. She cheats on her husband and trades her financially stable, solid, predictable life for the instability and at times, excitement, that comes from loving an addict. By the end of the book, Nina has come to terms with the fact that her codependency is putting her children at risk.

This is one of those books that is hard to read because you want to shake Nina and yell, “leave him! What is wrong with you? There’s children involved!” That’s part of the issue though, obsessive love doesn’t make sense. You can say that family and friends are enablers —and they are, to an extent— but what is the alternative? Seeing your loved one on the street, their body rotting from misuse, starving, dying alone. An addict will rarely be forced by others into fighting their addiction. Nina understand this, and knows there’s people out there that can cut someone off as soon as their offers of help are being abused, and I think she understands there’s a strength in that. She was not one of those people. Her whole life she’s been conditioned to help the people around her, to the detriment to herself, her kids, her stability.

Nina speaks with a clear, poignant voice. She’s that rare type of person that can look upon her past with a keen sense of awareness. I think those of us that are aware of our trauma tend to be a bit sadder. Though I haven’t ever been in a codependent situation with an addict, I have been in a codependent relationship with someone that adamantly ignored their own trauma’s existence, which spurred into a toxic, harmful relationship. I related heavily to Nina’s talk of obsessive love, to the addiction of the adrenaline that an unstable relationship provides, of how a calm relationship can be difficult to adjust to after. She is also a middle child, like myself, and talks about how that made her more likely the peacemaker, the pleaser. Less likely to say no, more likely to say yes. I could see a lot of myself in her descriptions even though I didn’t have the same experience.

There’s also a theme of female empowerment here. Women are often the ones caring for people at their own expense, but most of our growth comes from when we are alone. Nina watches her mother blossom after the end of her relationship with an addict. When she ends her own relationship, she is able to provide a secure and stable life for her kids. It can be hard to find the line between empathy for others and respecting the needs of our own lives, but there’s a strength in both. There’s a really lovely quote about women becoming themselves in the space where men aren’t, that I’d love to include after publication.

I must admit, there were a few moments that I glazed over. There was a cycle of attending Al-Anon while alternatively berating Al-Anon. I’m sure this would be more interesting to people that have gone through this cycle, though. There were also moments that our author skipped around and then kept going back to parts of her life that she had previously talked about. Some of those moment seemed like they would have been more interesting to address this chronologically instead of tearing us away from the current topic to revisit. These were some of the only flaws I could see. Ultimately, I give this book 4 out of 5 stars.

There’s some beautiful quotes from this book that I’d love to share but I am obligated to wait until after publication. I will repost with quotes at that time. Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls will be published April 21st, 2020.