Love Junkie: A Memoir

Book: Love Junkie: A Memoir , by Rachel Resnick, ISBN10: 1596914947, ISBN13: 9781596914940, Bloomsbury USA, November 2008, Hardcover

Rachel Resnick is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick. She has published articles, essays, and celebrity profile cover stories nationally in the Los Angeles Times, Women’s Health, and BlackBook. She is a contributing editor at Tin House magazine. Her essays and stories have appeared in The Time of My Life, Damage Control, The Dictionary of Failed Relationships, The Best American Erotica 2004, Women on the Edge, L.A. Shorts, and Absolute Disaster. She is also the founder and CEO of Writers On Fire, provider of luxury writing retreats both here and abroad.

Rachel Resnick hits her forties single, broke, depressed, childless—a train wreck. After an ex-boyfriend breaks into her home and vandalizes it, Resnick takes the time to look back over her romantic and sexual history to ask the question: What is wrong with me? Her addiction to sex and love has cost her in damaging ways throughout the course of her life. At the root of her issues: a Dickensian childhood and a haunting experience she must finally confront.

Written with raw humor and unflinching honesty, Love Junkie charts Rachel Resnick’s harrowing emotional journey from destructive love to intimacy, from despair to hope. By peeling back one painful layer after another, she discovers a glaring pattern: She is addicted to the fantasy of romantic bliss, marriage, and children.

Although her story is an extreme one, what we realize over the course of Resnick’s journey is how many people experience aspects of this addiction and the self-destruction that comes with it—all fed by a culture where romantic obsession is stoked by the stories we read, the movies we see, and the dreams we’re fed. This unique memoir cracks open one of the more elusive and pervasive modern-day compulsions—and holds a mirror up to each of us.

Publishers Weekly

In her raw account of love gone wrong, L.A. journalist Resnick (Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick) describes her descent into self-debasement. Resnick's lifelong attraction to unsuitable men-unavailable, abusive and emotionally damaged-hit a perilous stage by the time she reached her early 40s and her last boyfriend, Spencer, who had seemed the "perfect victim to make [her] dreams come true," broke into her house and wrecked her computer. Alternating with her litany of awful relationships-from the scarily egotistical ex-con painter Eddie to the various men who refused to have a baby with her-Resnick delineates her appalling, loveless childhood and the neglect by her hard-drinking mother, who lost custody of her and her younger brother when Resnick was 12. Subsequently, the teenager bounced around foster homes because she was not welcome in the new household of her father, remarried to an Orthodox Jew with four new children of his own. Resnick's memoir is a desperate, self-excoriating attempt to break the victim cycle first taught to her expertly by her mother, "the original love junkie"; engender a tenderness for her rather indifferent father; and mend the estrangement from her brother. Most important in terms of survival in this painfully honest memoir, Resnick found the wherewithal through a support group to heal and reground herself. (Dec.)

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