"Shanna McNair is a writer of great astringency, intensity, and lucidity, but also one of deep feeling. She's perhaps a lapsed idealist, as Mary McCarthy said of one other, but in the best sense, in which the ideals still show plainly through. . . The model for this elevated, poignant, lacerating, romanticist vision of human longing is the Denis Johnson of the early period, the guy who wrote Angels, and perhaps, via Denis Johnson, the Isaac Babel of Red Cavalry, where the very worst human tendencies are somehow the long slow way, the very costly way to God." -Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm

". . . the rat-a-tat wordplay and rhythms of Jack Kerouac . . . the bell-clear reflectiveness of Marguerite Duras...A fierce, technicolor ride, brimming with calamity, sorrow, flashes of wild humor, and an overarching love for whom we meet and what we might become."" -Alexandra Oliver, author of Hail, The Invisible Watchman

" . . a captivating must-read." -Chris Abani, author of GraceLand

". . . evokes the radical awareness of an individual who is often too smart for her own good and riddled with flaws that she wears as humble marks of her humanity. Hers is a wayward voice finding its way back to itself, a woman's voice with nothing left to lose . . . weeping tears of joy as well as pain, and where one least expects it, trip-wiring stunning flashes of beauty." -Diane Oatley, author of Swoon and translator of The History of Bees

". . . sustains the clarity and no-word-wasted dramatic propulsion of the best memoirs. . . page by page, the quiet and not-so-quiet discomforts that teethe on our days-that drive us to make distraction a sacrament-are illuminated for us. . ."" --Tim Seibles, author of Voodoo Libretto