Cliterature, the Vagina Museum's book club, offers you a generous and satisfying fingering through the feminist pages. We’ll include a mixture of fiction, non-fiction, essays and poetry. Everyone is welcome. Our book club is led by former trustee, Niharika Jain.
About the book
A moving memoir of a love affair with an addict, weaving personal reckoning with psychology and history to grapple with addiction, codependency and our appetite for obsessive love
'The disease he has is addiction,' Nina Renata Aron writes of her boyfriend. 'The disease I have is loving him.' Their affair is dramatic, urgent - an intoxicating antidote to the lonely days of early motherhood. But soon, K starts using again. Even as his addiction deepens, she stays, thinking she can save him. It's a familiar pattern, developed in an adolescence marred by family trauma - how can she break it? If she leaves, has she failed?
In this unflinching memoir, Aron shows the devastating effect of addiction on loved ones. She also untangles the messy ties between her own history of enabling, society's expectations of womanhood and our ideas of love. She cracks open the feminised phenomenon of co-dependency, tracing its development from the formation of Al-Anon to recent research in the psychology of addiction, and asks uncomfortable questions about when help becomes harm, and when we choose to leave. “Ferocious . . . glints with hard-won truths . . . Aron lights a path through the darkness of her past toward a better future.”—Los Angeles Times “Unflinching . . . Aron writes in gripping prose about the thrills and dangers of her own substance use and relationship with K—their weak-kneed passion and wolfish needs, as well as her guilt-ridden enabling and savior-complex optimism.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“In Nina Renata Aron’s scorching, unvarnished memoir, an addiction story gets spun from the perspective of the helpless partner, the lover too stuck in a dangerous dynamic to find her way out.”—Entertainment Weekly
About the author
Nina Renata Aron is a writer and editor living in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
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Useful information: If you can, try to get your hands on a copy via your local independent bookshop or library as a physical book, e-book or audiobook.
As this is a participatory event by nature, not a performance, anyone who doesn't engage - which can via audio, text, or any method accessible to you - will be automatically removed to ensure safety of all participants. Don’t worry if you’ve not finished the book in time for the session, having read some or most of it will help you take part in our discussion.
Live transcription will be enabled on Zoom for all our events. If you need a transcript after the event, please email us at info@vaginamuseum.co.uk to get a copy.