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The Los Angeles Diaries: A Memoir, by James Brown
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Plagued by the suicides of both his siblings, and heir to alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and economic ruin, James Brown lived a life clouded by addiction, broken promises, and despair.
In The Los Angeles Diaries, he reveals his struggle for survival, mining his past to present the inspiring story of his redemption. Beautifully written and limned with dark humor, these twelve deeply confessional, interconnected chapters address personal failure, heartbreak, the trials of writing for Hollywood, and the life-shattering events that finally convinced Brown that he must “change or die.”
In “Snapshot,” Brown is five years old and recalls the night his mother “sets fire to an apartment building down the street.” In “Daisy,” Brown purchases a Vietnamese potbellied pig for his wife to atone for his sins, only to find the pig’s bulk growing in direct proportion to the tensions in his marriage.
Harrowing and brutally honest, The Los Angeles Diaries is the chronicle of a man on a collision course with life, who ultimately finds the strength and courage to conquer his demons and believe once more.
- Sales Rank: #289214 in Books
- Published on: 2011-03-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.18" h x .66" w x 5.62" l, .49 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 224 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Novelist Brown (Lucky Town; Hot Wire; etc.) mines the explosive territory of his own harsh and complicated life in this gut-wrenching memoir. The youngest child of a mentally ill mother and an absent father, Brown (b. 1957) grew up in the shadow of Hollywood with two older siblings: a brother, a moderately successful actor until his suicide at 27, and a sister who also dreamed of acting but took her life at 44. Brown's tales are harrowing: at five, he and his mother traveled from their San Jose home to San Francisco, where she set an apartment building ablaze. Arson couldn't be proven, but she was imprisoned for tax evasion. At nine, he shared his first drink and high with his siblings; when he was 12, a neighbor attempted to molest him; by 30 he was an alcohol- and cocaine-addicted writer-in-residence. During his marriage's early years, Brown often left his wife to feed his addictions, repeatedly promising her he'd reform. Desperate to fuel his writing career, he attempted screenwriting, but everything he pitched seemed too dark. Brown's genius compels readers to sympathize with him in every instance. Juxtaposed with the shimmery unreality of Hollywood, these essays bitterly explore real life, an existence careening between great promise and utter devastation. Brown's revelations have no smugness or self-congratulation; they reek of remorse and desire, passion and futility. Brown flays open his own tortured skin looking for what blood beats beneath and why. The result is a grimly exquisite memoir that reads like a noir novel but grips unrelentingly like the hand of a homeless drunk begging for help.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Novelist Brown adopts a blatantly confessional tone in his memoir of growing up with an emotionally disturbed mother and then drifting with his brother and sister into addiction even as he crafted award-winning stories. Looking back from the uncertain shore of sobriety, Brown alternates between his troubled childhood and even more troubling adulthood. In tragically tough prose, he details how he screwed over his first wife, children, sister, writing students, and agent--all while feeding addictions to booze, crank, and novels by hustling hollow teaching and scriptwriting gigs. But this feels like a tale written more for cash and catharsis than for connection. Brown says meeting his second wife changed his life and then keeps the process to himself, omitting the third act. Even though his is a story of selfishness selfishly told, Brown's blackout days make for a darkly alluring read. This is the kind of book that becomes an underground classic for all the wrong reasons. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Praise for The Los Angeles Diaries
"The best addiction memoirs reflect on the running and gunning with just the right amount of thoughtful remove, which is exactly what makes James Brown’s The Los Angeles Diaries so important. The title is deceptive in that there’s nothing diary-like about it: No diary could be this elegantly crafted and tightly woven. Structured as a series of standalone vignettes, the book has more than enough material to justify a woe-is-me stance—an arsonist mother and suicidal siblings, to start with—but a clear-headed voice that mines the subject matter of regret while refusing to ever wallow keeps the narrator out of self-pity. Underread and underrated, Brown’s vibrant imagery and nimble storytelling elevates The Los Angeles Diaries into a league all its own." —The Fix, selected as one of the Ten Best Addiction Memoirs
“The Los Angeles Diaries is one of those rare memoirs that cuts deeply, chillingly into the reader’s own dreams. It is a dramatic, vivid, heartbreaking, very personal story of human responsibility and guilt, of alcoholism, of suicide, of marital struggle, of the uncertainties and ambiguities of a writer’s life in modern America. The book is cleanly and beautifully written, and it’s also incredibly moving.” —Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried and winner of the National Book Award
“The Los Angeles Diaries is terrific. It’s one of the toughest memoirs I’ve ever read, at once spare and startlingly, admirably unsparing. It glows with a dark luminescence. James Brown is a fine, fine writer.” —Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“This gemlike collection . . . materializes in such delicate strokes that the emerging theme becomes one of almost miraculous forgiveness, any pain and rage all but hidden between the lines.” —San Francisco Chronicle (Best Books of the Year)
“Profound . . . unsparing and clear-eyed, a heartbreaking story, and yet oddly inspirational, the tale of the last man standing.” —Janet Fitch
“Life-affirming . . . An extraordinarily gripping, honest, and somehow uplifting tale. It seamlessly moves from bleak to beautiful . . . A darkly bright, hugely compassionate, and oddly redemptive story of loss and failure, guilt and addiction.” —The Independent
“As tragic as Brown’s life has been, the memoir displays neither pathos nor self-pity but elegiac wisdom . . . How moving is Brown’s The Los Angeles Diaries? While double-checking the quotes and facts, I simply gave in and reread it again, struck even more by its pain, its beauty and its craft.” —Deirdre Donahue, USA Today
“It’s the balance of agony and grace, of course, that makes life so ferociously interesting. Brown has perfectly captured that balance in this unpretentious, very profound book.” —Carolyn See, The Washington Post
“Novelist Brown (Lucky Town; Hot Wire; etc.) mines the explosive territory of his own harsh and complicated life in this gut-wrenching memoir . . . Brown’s genius compels readers to sympathize with him in every instance. Juxtaposed with the shimmery unreality of Hollywood, these essays bitterly explore real life, an existence careening between great promise and utter devastation. Brown’s revelations have no smugness or self-congratulation; they reek of remorse and desire, passion and futility. Brown flays open his own tortured skin looking for what blood beats beneath and why. The result is a grimly exquisite memoir that reads like a noir novel but grips unrelentingly like the hand of a homeless drunk begging for help.” —Publishers Weekly (Best Book of the Year)
“Brown’s blackout days make for a darkly alluring read. This is the kind of book that becomes an underground classic for all the wrong reasons.” —Booklist
“A riveting read. A supremely powerful and depressing memoir, then, one that seeks to evoke and express—rather than in any way explain—the misery that engulfed one ambitious American family.” —Kirkus
“The ‘Kennedy curse’ looks like a garden-variety hex compared with the dysfunction passed down among Brown's alcoholic clan. When the acclaimed Lucky Town novelist was 5, his embezzling mom dragged him along to an arson; both his siblings committed suicide in middle age; Brown himself abandoned his wife, kids, and college English students for days to binge on booze and meth. If that’s not bleak enough, consider this memoir’s really depressing scenes . . . Hollywood script meetings. It’s all riveting and self-pitiless, but two passages are priceless: a devastating imagining of the post-recovery shame that led his sister to dive into the bone-dry L.A. River, and his nightmarishly funny battle of wills with a potbellied pig that was supposed to salvage his marriage but instead helped demolish it.” —Chris Willman, Entertainment Weekly
“This is a ghost story, and James Brown should be dead. That he is not is a remarkable tale of perseverance in the face of staggering loss and tragedy.” —Charles Feldman, CNN
“Remarkable . . . Rises above the commonplace to the true art of comprehended pain . . . the hallmark of Brown’s prose is gravitas. His truths are definitive.” —DeWitt Henry, The Boston Globe
“Searing, gut-churning but ultimately luminous . . . The Los Angeles Diaries reads like the best—and darkest—fiction . . . Uncompromisingly bleak yet surprisingly beautiful, a passionate testament not only to how one can survive what should shatter and sunder irreparably, but that one can survive and in surviving, begin anew.” —The Baltimore Sun
“Each chapter shows the tool marks of the well-crafted short story, carefully and even lovingly shaped and polished until it shines . . . The stories amount to a memoir of stunning intimacy and unforgettable impact.” —Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“The book is a classic, deeply moving and expertly crafted.” —Sydney Morning Herald
“Vivid, shocking and funny . . . a darkly bright, hugely compassionate and oddly redemptive story of loss and failure, guilt and addiction.” —London Independent on Sunday (Best Books of the Year)
“A stark, affecting memoir about a writer seeking to comprehend and overcome his demons.” —Sunday London Times
Most helpful customer reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
A privilege to read.
By C. Middleton
There's something terribly disturbing about confessional writing. In the hands of a man or woman at the top of their craft, a writer of immense skill and transparency, the experience for the reader can border on the pathological. Honesty without the slightest hint of pretence, particularly from an experienced and intelligent individual, knowing full well that what they tell the world is deeply personal and the honest to goodness truth, is rare. There's always some other agenda. For example, the two most famous confessional pieces in world literature are St. Augustine's Confessions and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Confessions; both author's had an agenda in writing these works, whether for purposes of religious conversion or literary immortality - both achieved their respective ends. Brown's book, however, is different. This is a writer telling a story because this particular story needed to be told. I get the impression that Brown needed to communicate his life in the only form he knew how to as a writer. This is a memoir about writing, addiction, alcoholism, relationships and human responsibility. It is about madness, suicide, compulsion, irony and love. This is a heartbreaking story that leaves the reader with a tiny glimmer of hope. As a true confessional does, it doesn't raise feelings of sympathy or thoughts of self-righteous condescension, but a real empathy, because we've all experienced, in varying degrees, this man's life.
Brown's vivid and deceptively rendered prose reminds me of a style of American writing that's all its own. One reads this simple, clear-eyed style of writing and thinks that it would be easy to imitate. Wrong. It appears simple but is awfully difficult to do. Brown's prose adds to the subject matter, making his family obsessions and chemical escapes much harsher, difficult to swallow, but in the end, inspiring and troubling.
The L.A. Diaries is a rare memoir because it is what it is and doesn't pretend to be anything else. Brown is a fine writer and this work was a privilege to read.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
A Modern American Tragedy
By Seshat
"The Los Angeles Diaries" continue the tragic story begun in the book "Final Performance". dealing with the author, James Brown's
ability to cope with the issues of a tumultous childhood, which contributed toward the suicides of his older siblings Barry (a rising TV/movie star of the 1970's) and Marilyn.
The first part of the book describes the frustrations of the author (a college professor) at his ill-starred attempts to sell screenplays to Hollywood, and the familial way of handling disappointment with drugs and alcohol. Interspersed throughout
are vignettes (told in flashback) of his childhood, some sentimental, some chilling.
Brown also relates the difficulty of maintaining a sober facade before college professors and students(well acquainted with the
drug scene) who view him cynically.
One bright spot is the hilarious narrative of Jame Brown's attempt to mollify his angry wife with a pot-bellied pig as a peace offering.
The Machiavellian porker is named Daisy, and Brown's problems
burgeon in direct proportion to Daisy's expensive appetite -
and expansive girth.
Man and pig butt heads; in a contest between man and animal,
the animal will win hands down because it has "cuteness" on its side. (The end of the chapter is a riot...)
The second half of "The Los Angeles Diaries" is depressing, describing the downward spiral, and subsequent suicides of
Brown's brother, Barry, and his sister, Marilyn.
By the end of his life, Barry Brown was out of control: impersonating a police officer (a character from a movie) and
drinking compulsively. He shot himself to death at age 27.
Marilyn Brown attempted to wean herself from alcohol and drugs, but past demons prompted her one night to climb onto the railing of an overpass, then fling herself to her death in the dry riverbed below.
The book ends on an optimistic note; while in South Dakota, James Brown resolved to go cold turkey, or die - he made it.
But - his two books ("The Los Angeles Diaries" and "Final Performance") are touching memorials by the survivor to the siblings who didn't make it...
A new American classic.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Terrific concept, terrific execution
By E. Kutinsky
There are a number of things going really right for The Los Angeles Diaries, but none moreso than Brown's conception of his memoir - each chapter a different essay detailing a different discrete portion of his life, so each chapter will jump back and forth a decade or two. It could be disjointed, but instead it's the notion of one consciousness getting out exactly what it needs to for our understanding and letting us crane our necks a bit to fill in the details. This works because James Brown is a writer of such fierce conviction that the notions carry over from one section to another, the reality of his experience connected by spurts and sources of identity, linked by the fierce honesty of his experience. If you're like me, this is hardly the first "addiction memoir" you've picked up (it's practically a genre in itself), but it's especially distinct by a narrator who doesn't "hit bottom" in the typical fashion; Brown is a man always on the fringes of total oblivion managing to salvage himself. It makes for an unforgettable, even inspiring read, but it does leave a couple giant questions - notably, how was the ultimate breakthrough allowing him to remain clean so different from his others? He'd discussed other times he spent days or weeks without drugs or booze, what made this book's ultimate conclusion so distinct? It's abrupt ending won't answer that question, which is tantalizing, but it will leave you with an indelible picture of hope, and a gloriously specific, scrappy image of survival.
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