Friday, January 25, 2013

With Or Without You by Domenica Ruta

With or Without You by Domenica Ruta

Thank you to Random House and Netgalley for my Advance Reading Copy.  Release Date February 26, 2013

So many things in With or Without You struck a cord with me.  First off was Nikki's relationship with her mother.  Plain and simple her mother was nuts, aside from the fact she did drugs and alcohol with abandon, wanted her teenage daughter to get pregnant, and made an art of living off welfare. That is until she turned her husband's failing taxi service into a million dollar business. 

Her mother Kathy, loved her, but hated her in the same way.  Nikki was smart, wanted to follow the rules, needed to be accepted.  Kathy figured out how to get Nikki into private boarding school, and herself into a Harvard college extension program.  But eventually she dragged Nikki into her dark work of drugs, cheating and lies. Nikki is a child who is helpless to fight back.    

It is no surprise that Nikki can't keep herself above her mother's addiction.  Pills snorted and swallowed, alcohol consumed by the gallon, hangovers so miserable the only relief comes from more drugs become her way of life.  Yet something inside her longs to stop. One line in the story made me stop, and I'm quoting, " I wasn't an alcoholic.  I had a job, a boyfriend, and a college diploma."  This is the same lie I told myself for years until I found the courage to stop drinking.  Nikki's on again, off again struggle to stay sober resonated deeply.

I'm fascinated by memoirs of women who by some miracle overcome, the overbearing, controlling and addicted mother who has inflicted great pain on the child since birth.  They are stories of the mind overtaking the love that lives in every woman's heart. Self gratification taking the place of a mother's instinct to nurture is concept I want to understand.  Maybe it's the reason I find so much sympathy in this kind of novel.  The incredibly deep soul searching it took to write such a story, is what makes the tale so brilliant. It is also what allowed Nikki to overcome. I love success stories.

 

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