Praise for The Los Angeles Diaries: A Memoir
“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
“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
“With The Los Angeles Diaries, [Brown’s] written a beautiful book. It’s a miracle . . . 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, Washington Post Book World
“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)
“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)
“Remarkable . . . Rises about the commonplace to the true art of comprehended pain . . . Brown’s cadenced, plain prose sings with a deadpan grace, at once hard-eyed and vulnerable, eschewing either false emotion or frigidity . . . The hallmark of his prose is gravitas. His truths are definitive.”
—Boston Globe
“As tragic as Brown’s life has been, the memoir displays neither pathos nor self-pity but elegiac wisdom . . . How moving is Brown’s 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
“Riveting . . . priceless.”
—Entertainment Weekly (“A” review)
“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
“Novelist Brown mines the explosive territory of his own harsh and complicated life in this gut-wrenching memoir . . . 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.”
—Publisher’s Weekly (Best Books of the Year, starred review)
“The unfolding tragedy of James Brown’s doomed family, torn apart by drugs, alcohol, madness and suicide, makes one consider the possibility of curse, of haunting . . . The Los Angeles Diaries is unsparing and clear-eyed, a heartbreaking story, and yet oddly inspirational, the tale of the last man standing.”
—Janet Fitch
“A stark, affecting memoir about a writer seeking to comprehend and overcome his demons.”
—Sunday London Times
“James Brown, novelist, college professor and screenwriter, writes straight-up in lucid, unadorned prose. This book is about humanity and love, not just addiction.”
—The Hartford Courant
“This is a compelling tale of addiction and fear . . . a harrowing story that doesn’t ask for your pity, but merely to look at what’s crawling about under the rock in this starkly powerful memoir.”
—The Glasgow Herald
“The Los Angeles Diaries is spare and unsparing, a beautifully written account of how a child can process anger and pain and turn it into art, self-destruction and redemption. Brown’s book is a moving account of addiction and recovery and a signal that a talented writer is back and at the top of his game.”
—The Oregonian
“Brown is a fine writer. His prose is lean and crisp and the heartache is written between the lines, like the loaded space in a pregnant pause . . . The writing is crystalline.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“This complex memoir defies pat interpretation. Brown’s prose is direct and confessional as he . . . fuses stark, poignant tales of woe and authorial insight without descending into self-pity or self-indulgence.”
—Seattle Weekly (Best Memoirs of the Year)
“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: Paula Zahn Now
“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
“What sets the book apart is the toughness of the prose, the clear yet compassionate way that the missed and thrown opportunities, the endless fruitless pitches to Hollywood, his own broken marriage and his current position as, quite literally, the last man standing in his family are relayed in unflinching yet strangely beautiful detail.”
—Arena
“Unflinchingly honest, beautifully written and utterly heartbreaking, The Los Angeles Diaries is a haunting and powerful tale of love and loss.”
—Ink
“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
“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.”
—Baltimore Sun
“The book’s extremely clean and fluid prose is a pleasure to read. With The Los Angeles Diaries, Brown has written a disturbing, sad, but ultimately uplifting tale.”
—The Denver Post
“From the worst of deprivation springs the greatest inspiration . . . [Brown’s] honesty is as important to the success of his memoir as his style of writing. His sentences are short and pointed, leaving little room for sentimentalism; flowery language is non-existent. This is a writer who has no one to impress.”
—The Irish Post
“The Los Angeles Diaries is no ordinary memoir, and Brown is one fearless writer.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Clear-eyed, unsentimental . . . It invites comparison with Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and James Ellroy.”
—London Observer
“In this uncompromising memoir, Brown has the skills to step outside of his life and write clean, driving sentences about characters and situations as rich as the finest fiction.”
—Book Sense
“I’ve never read a better story about addiction. It’s also one of the best modern autobiographies I’ve ever read, addiction notwithstanding . . . Inspiring, witty, and bleak, James Brown’s book will appeal to anyone with an interest in addiction—and anyone who enjoys tough, spare prose.”
—Dirk Hanson, author of The Chemical Carousel: What Science Tells Us About Addiction