Three New Memoirs Tackling Addiction and Mental Illness - Fall Preview 2008 -- New York Magazine

Alcoholic Unanonymous!

Book	Problem Faced	Rock Bottom	Epiphany
Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction by Susan Cheever. Simon & Schuster. October 7.	On top of her fully fledged alcoholism, Cheever diagnoses herself as addicted to sex partners.	Sleeping with mother’s oncologist and forgetting to pick up 6-year-old daughter as the result of a tryst. Letting basset hound Bentley eat the wedding cake at her third wedding.	Realizing that she can choose not to sleep with the sexy architect who woos her mid-interview.
Scattershot: My Bipolar Family by David Lovelace. Dutton. September 4.	David Lovelace confronts his bipolar disorder, while trying to help his father, mother, and brother, who all have forms of manic depression or schizophrenia.	On (manic) father’s instruction, Lovelace poisons mother by giving her too much lithium.	Discovering his kids aren’t doomed to share his family’s problems.
Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg. Other Press. September 9.	A Greenwich Village “hack” journalist reels when his 15-year-old daughter, Sally, has a sudden, violent crack-up.	Greenberg swallows a full dose of Sally’s medication in the attempt to “see the world as she does”; in a stupor, he stabs himself with a fork.	His wife, Pat, turns the trauma of Sally’s time in the psych ward into a modern-dance piece called Clinical Data. Greenberg fears that it is “too intense,” but Sally finds it mesmerizing and healing.