Published in 2020
256 pages
Deborah A. Lott is a writer of narrative nonfiction and creative nonfiction. In addition to her two books, her essays, op-eds, and memoirs have been published widely. Recent publications include a Los Angeles Times op-ed, “Fear of Covid-19 Won’t Make You Safer,” and essays in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Scoundrel Time, the Rumpus, the Bellingham Review, the nervous breakdown, and other places. She teaches literature and creative writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles.
What is this book about?
Don’t Go Crazy Without Me tells the tragicomic coming of age story of a girl who grew up under the seductive sway of her outrageously eccentric father. He taught her how to have fun; he also taught her to fear food poisoning, other children’s infectious diseases, and the contaminating propensities of the world at large. Alienated from her emotionally distant mother, the girl bonded closely with her father and his worldview. When he plunged from neurotic to full-blown psychotic, she nearly followed him. Sanity is not always a choice, but for the sixteen-year-old, decisions had to be made and lines drawn between reality and what her mother called her “overactive imagination.” She would have to give up beliefs carried by the infectious agent of her father’s love.
Saving herself would require an unconventional reading of Moby Dick, sexual pleasure in the body that had confounded her, and entry into the larger world of political activism as a volunteer in Robert F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign. After attending his last stop at the Ambassador Hotel the night of his assassination, she would come to a new reckoning with loss and with engagement beyond the confines of her family. Ultimately, she would find a way to turn her grief into love.
