LIZ: BOOK #20

The Los Angeles Diaries: A Memoir by James Brown

224 pages

Completed 4/19/10

Overdue for a memoir I would enjoy, I picked this book up off the shelf it'd been sitting on for over a year. Brown allows the reader to delve into his drug and alcohol fueled existence with brief interruptions of his troubled childhood. Relationships with his disturbed mother, equally addicted brother and sister, a less than perfect father, and broken marriage with rarely-mentioned children paint a picture of a broken man.

Shaped by addiction, Brown's memoir is dark and haunted by the suicides of his siblings. However, as in most memoirs I enjoy, dry humor is laced throughout - both by the mere pathetic events that take place and Brown's own awareness.

Of note: the last chapter, focused on the author's suicidal sister, is written in a different way than the rest of the book. Normally, this would bother me; I like consistency in writing. However, the confusion and broken sentences allowed me to understand the desperation of the characters and the rise to the surface of addiction that Brown seemed to have made. With unanswered questions, I went to Google with searches of Brown's epilogue - to me, a successful memoir that led me to wanting more.