VIRTUAL: ZYZZYVA & The Booksmith Present: Lockdown Lit @ Lunch with Nina Renata Aron & Julian Tepper

Booksmith and The Bindery, in partnership with Zyzzyva, present Lockdown Lit @ Lunch, a weekly salon, Tuesdays at 11am PST. Lockdown Literature is a group of authors with books published during the coronavirus pandemic who have banded together to support one another. This event features Nina Renata Aron (Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love) & Julian Tepper (Between the Records).

You can find a full list of Lockown Lit authors here. Please save the date and join us!

This event will be streaming live on our Facebook page.

Friends, neighbors: We are pleased to be able to bring you some of our events virtually while our doors are otherwise closed in the interest of public health. If you’d like to support the store, you can still do that in the usual ways:

> Buy Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls and/or Between the Records and we’ll deliver them directly to your door.
> Buy one of our gift certificates, which we keep on file and never expire.
> Make a donation.

Thank you very much for your support – we’re proud to be a legacy business and a mainstay of the Haight-Ashbury since 1976!

Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love by Nina Renata Aron

“The disease he has is addiction,” Nina Renata Aron writes of her boyfriend, K. “The disease I have is loving him.” Their love affair is dramatic, urgent, overwhelming—an intoxicating antidote to the long, lonely days of early motherhood. Soon after they get together, K starts using again, and years of relapses and broken promises follow. Even as his addiction deepens, she stays, convinced she is the one who can get him sober. After an adolescence marred by family trauma and addiction, Nina can’t help but feel responsible for those suffering around her. How can she break this pattern? If she leaves K, has she failed him?

Writing in prose at once unflinching and acrobatic, Aron delivers a piercing memoir of romance and addiction, drawing on intimate anecdotes as well as academic research to crack open the long-feminized and overlooked phenomenon of codependency. She shifts between visceral, ferocious accounts of her affair with K and introspective analyses of the part she plays in his addictions, as well as defining moments in the history of codependency, from the temperance movement to the formation of Al-Anon to more recent research in the psychology of addiction. Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls is a blazing, bighearted book that illuminates and adds nuance to the messy tethers between femininity, enabling, and love.

Nina Renata Aron is a writer and editor living in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Jezebel, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Between the Records by Julian Tepper

Jules and Adam Newman’s complex, often hostile, relationship has long fueled their music careers as they followed in their father’s footsteps. After the release of their debut record, and while struggling to write tracks for the followup, the brothers begin to clash. Jules, the younger brother, feels cast aside and ignored by Adam, who has long been accustomed to having things his own way. From the studio to the stage and across the countless miles in between, Julian Tepper’s third novel is a moody and heady work of autofiction based on his days in the Natural History, which he and his brother formed in 2001. Between the Records examines brothers, fathers, rock and roll, and the personal demons therein — both musical and familial.

Julian Tepper is the author of three novels, Between the Records, Ark and Balls, and the essay, ‘In Which Phillip Roth Gave Me Life Advice.‘ His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Playboy, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. He lives in New York City.

This event is free and all ages.

RSVP appreciated by not required.