I am incredibly grateful for the following review of my book, which will run in the January issue of ELLE:

In America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life (Simon & Schuster), journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis follows people struggling (and mostly managing) to prevail over self-destruction. To his credit, he doesn’t attempt definitive answers to the big questions; instead, without didacticism he lays bare their realities, allowing his subjects to speak for themselves.

The result is a graceful, compelling book focusing directly on people, not on concepts or proscriptive ideas. The subjects are a varied bunch: Jody, a blind drug and alcohol abuser and founder of several sober-living communities; Janice, a grandmother and recovering crackhead and junkie; Kate, a shoplifting wife and mother; Todd, a bisexual, bodybuilding meth addict and steroid abuser; Ellen, a food-addicted Jewish wife and mother of three; Bobby, a junkie; Marvin, an alcoholic in a retirement community; and Sean, a young sex addict.

Denizet-Lewis relates their successes, relapses, and struggles to stay clean with warmth, clarity, and a deeply refreshing, unpuritanical frankness. Rather than posing as a disembodied authority, he freely expresses his feelings and opinions and comes clean about his own sex addiction. As a result of this courageous narrative strategy, he emerges fully as vulnerable and flawed as the people he writes about.

In the end he concludes that the more we delve, the more complex and individual addiction appears. In laying bare the irreducibly personal nature of the struggle, he advances the conversation about addiction in a profound and important way: as closer to home, more idiosyncratic and nuanced than many might suspect.—Kate Christensen

For more early reviews, go to Reviews