Good Morning, Destroyer Of Men’s Souls – Nina Renata Aron

I know we shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover… but judging it by its title is fine, right? Good Morning, Destroyer Of Men’s Souls is a corker. I would’ve picked up this book no matter what it was about.

Luckily, Nina Renata Aron has the chops to back it up. This is an incredible memoir about love and addiction, from the perspective of the one who loves the addict. As Aron herself points out, the literature on addiction written by addicts is vast and varied, with her role too-often relegated to that of “supporting cast”.

She clearly took Toni Morrison’s advice to heart: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,”.

The central narrative of the book is Aron’s relationship with K, an addict whose first taste of opioid painkillers came after a cancer recurrence. But Aron also joins the dots with her sister’s addiction, and that of her mother’s boyfriend, and the broader view of the historically gendered labour of addiction, to explain how she found herself raising a child with a man who couldn’t start the day without using.

Good Morning, Destroyer Of Men’s Souls is a unflinching account of a life of co-dependency, a must-read for fans of Kate Holden, Cheryl Strayed, and Susannah Cahalan.

Buy Good Morning, Destroyer Of Men’s Souls on Booktopia here. (affiliate link)