“A harrowing, beautiful, searching, and deeply literary memoir…a story of true self-salvation and transformation.” Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author
Description
As a young college graduate a year into treatment with a psychiatrist, Cree LeFavour began to organize her days around the cruel, compulsive logic of self-harm: with each newly lit cigarette, the world would drop away as her focus narrowed on the fierce, blooming release of pleasure-pain as the burning tip was applied to an unblemished patch of skin. Her body was a canvas of cruelty, each scar a mark of pride and shame.
In sharp and shocking language, Lights On, Rats Out brings us closely into these years. We see the world as Cree did―turned upside down, the richness of life muted and dulled, its pleasures perverted. The heady thrill of meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. Adam N. Kohl―whose relationship with Cree is at once sustaining and paralyzing―comes to be the only bright spot in her days.
Lights On, Rats Out illuminates a fiercely bright and independent woman’s charged attachment to a mental-health professional and the dangerous compulsion to keep him in her life at all costs.
Praise
“A harrowing, beautiful, searching, and deeply literary memoir…a story of true self-salvation and transformation.” Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author
“Shockingly intimate.” People
“With chilled, unflinching precision, in Lights On, Rats Out, Lefavour lays bare her struggles with self-mutilation, chronicling a terrifying clash between mind and flesh. A vivid, unsettling, and powerful read.” Jonathan Miles, author of Want Not
“LeFavour uses the force of her blisteringly stark, mesmerizingly self-aware prose to not only unearth her own demons but also equip the reader with the language to articulate our own as well.” Harper’s Bazaar
“Eloquent, irreverent, graphically precise.” Vulture
Details
| Language | English |
|---|---|
| Release Day | Jul 31, 2017 |
| Release Date | August 1, 2017 |
| Release Date Machine | 1501545600 |
| Imprint | Blackstone Publishing |
| Provider | Blackstone Publishing |
| Categories | Biographies & Memoirs, Nonfiction - Adult, Nonfiction - All |
Author Bio
Cree LeFavour is the author of several cookbooks, including the James Beard Award–nominated Fish, published by Chronicle Books. She has a PhD in American Studies and taught writing at New York University. She lives with her husband, Dwight Garner, and their children in New Jersey.
Narrator Bio
Cree LeFavour is the author of several cookbooks, including the James Beard Award–nominated Fish, published by Chronicle Books. She has a PhD in American Studies and taught writing at New York University. She lives with her husband, Dwight Garner, and their children in New Jersey.
Overview
As a young college graduate a year into treatment with a psychiatrist, Cree LeFavour began to organize her days around the cruel, compulsive logic of self-harm: with each newly lit cigarette, the world would drop away as her focus narrowed on the fierce, blooming release of pleasure-pain as the burning tip was applied to an unblemished patch of skin. Her body was a canvas of cruelty, each scar a mark of pride and shame.
In sharp and shocking language, Lights On, Rats Out brings us closely into these years. We see the world as Cree did―turned upside down, the richness of life muted and dulled, its pleasures perverted. The heady thrill of meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. Adam N. Kohl―whose relationship with Cree is at once sustaining and paralyzing―comes to be the only bright spot in her days.
Lights On, Rats Out illuminates a fiercely bright and independent woman’s charged attachment to a mental-health professional and the dangerous compulsion to keep him in her life at all costs.
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