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Rating: 
Summary: Haunting and familiar
Review: I would also use the word haunting to describe this book. Haunting and gut-wrenching, and in a strange way, almost familiar in parts. As I read it, totally engrossed, I kept thinking "there, but for the grace of God....". The rather innocent beginning, in a college town in the midwest, reminded me of earlier days of my own, as well as the meeting of someone who is so appealing that it creates an instant bond. And then the mysterious stangeness of addiction, and the feeling that somehow you could make it all better, but can't. And then the second part, stranger than the first, but no less plausible, just that the author slid over the edge of 'rationality'. Mary Allen is a compelling writer, and a courageous one. I'm glad I read this book (twice), although it was an intense and occasionally an uncomfortable experience.
Rating: 
Summary: Haunting memoir of addiction, love and grief.
Review: Mary Allan tells quite a story about the love of her life, Jim Beamen. They have somewhat of a whirlwind romance and Mary starts to see that Jim has an addiction to cocaine. Mary chonicles her spiral downward with Jim as his addiction becomes out of control; coupled with alcoholism and their codependecy.When Jim commits suicide, Mary can't cope with her loss. She begins a descent into mental illness. Mary becomes 'addicted' to "automatic writing" in which she believes she is corresponding with Jim's spirit. I think Allan is very brave to write this memoir. I can't imagine her sadness, or her irrational thoughts. They seem so strange and as I read them, I could feel her overwhelming sadness and desperation to connect with Jim...and it takes courage for her to share that sad desperation with others. I found her writing style effective and I would recommend anyone who has suffered a tragic loss to read this book as it offers an insight into codependency, addiction and grief. Worthy of 4 stars.
Rating:
Summary: Haunting memoir of addiction, love and grief.
Review: Mary Allan tells quite a story about the love of her life, Jim Beamen. They have somewhat of a whirlwind romance and Mary starts to see that Jim has an addiction to cocaine. Mary chonicles her spiral downward with Jim as his addiction becomes out of control; coupled with alcoholism and their codependecy. When Jim commits suicide, Mary can't cope with her loss. She begins a descent into mental illness. Mary becomes 'addicted' to "automatic writing" in which she believes she is corresponding with Jim's spirit. I think Allan is very brave to write this memoir. I can't imagine her sadness, or her irrational thoughts. They seem so strange and as I read them, I could feel her overwhelming sadness and desperation to connect with Jim...and it takes courage for her to share that sad desperation with others. I found her writing style effective and I would recommend anyone who has suffered a tragic loss to read this book as it offers an insight into codependency, addiction and grief. Worthy of 4 stars.
Rating:
Summary: A sad and very open story
Review: Mary Allen has written a very candid account of her love affair with an alcoholic cocaine addict that is, at times, so unguarded as to be embarassing. Why doesn't this intelligent, articulate woman take charge of her life and relationship? Love, and all of the inexplicable things it leads us to do, is the answer. I was engrossed by the first part of the book wherein Mary recounted the love affair and eventual suicide of Jim. The second half of the book, in which she recounts her search for answers rang true to me, as the surviver of a loved one's suicide, but was ultimately (and inevitably) unsatisfying. There are no answers out there.
Rating:
Summary: No New Age Nonsense Here!
Review: Mary Allen has written an important book about drug addiction, its effect on the life of not just the addict, and how "co-dependency" makes it all that much "easier" for the addict and those are closest to the addict, continue on their destructive paths. Then Ms. Allen describes to us her own brief visit into the realm of mental illness and her obsessive search for what ever remains of her ill-starred love, Jim Beaman, as a spirit or "shade". To have revealed as much as Ms. Allen has about her own problems took a great deal of courage, I think. If the reader is looking for a lot of "New Age" nonsense about the afterlife and her experiences in attempting to contact the spirit of Jim Beaman, you won't find it here! If Ms. Allen is anything at all, it's thoughtful and level-headed. She is not prone to flights of New Age fancy . But she does show us just how ephemeral the human spirit can be. I can't recommend this book too highly. It may not "satisfy" the "sensationalist seeking" reader fixated on learning all the "nuts and bolts" of Ms. Allen's attempts at after-death communication with the shade of her deceased lover, and just how successful she was. But this book was never intended to be that kind of book. It was written in a "literary style", it raises importatant questions of human spirituality, and is as "down-to-earth" as Ms. Allens' adopted Iowa.
Rating:
Summary: An amazing connection
Review: This book so moved me that I felt compelled to write to Mary Allen, though I've never written to an author before. I found my copy in a second-hand store. It drew me to it in much the same way that Mary's life had coincidences and connections that could not be predicted. How can I say what affected me so about it? It wasn't that, 22 years ago, a close friend took his life, as Jim Beaman did. It wasn't quite because my ex had a bad relationship with cocaine. It was really that the honest telling of Mary's love and life with Jim was so true, in all its details. I believe, as Mary does, in life after death. And I also believe in synchronicity, those strange seeming coincidences that catch us by surprise. Dreaming of a friend, and then she calls the next day, after years of silence. Learning a new word, and then you start seeing it everywhere. One coincidence about this particular copy of the book took me totally by surprise. The book, of course, was used, so it had its former owner's name, in feminine script, on the first page. "N. [last name]," it read. When I flipped to the Acknowledgments section at some later point (it was dog-eared), I saw Mary's last thank-you sentence: "... and John [same last name], who read the manuscript and listened to me talk about it so often he practically knows it by heart." So this book has come to mean more to me than just the story, which is moving and sparkling enough. Although N. gave it away, I never will!
Rating:
Summary: An amazing connection
Review: This book so moved me that I felt compelled to write to Mary Allen, though I've never written to an author before. I found my copy in a second-hand store. It drew me to it in much the same way that Mary's life had coincidences and connections that could not be predicted. How can I say what affected me so about it? It wasn't that, 22 years ago, a close friend took his life, as Jim Beaman did. It wasn't quite because my ex had a bad relationship with cocaine. It was really that the honest telling of Mary's love and life with Jim was so true, in all its details. I believe, as Mary does, in life after death. And I also believe in synchronicity, those strange seeming coincidences that catch us by surprise. Dreaming of a friend, and then she calls the next day, after years of silence. Learning a new word, and then you start seeing it everywhere. One coincidence about this particular copy of the book took me totally by surprise. The book, of course, was used, so it had its former owner's name, in feminine script, on the first page. "N. [last name]," it read. When I flipped to the Acknowledgments section at some later point (it was dog-eared), I saw Mary's last thank-you sentence: "... and John [same last name], who read the manuscript and listened to me talk about it so often he practically knows it by heart." So this book has come to mean more to me than just the story, which is moving and sparkling enough. Although N. gave it away, I never will!
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