Chancers: Addiction, Prison, Recovery, Love

This unengaging memoir is narrated in turns by Stellin, a freelance writer who is an on-again-off-again girlfriend of and self-described guardian angel to MacIndoe, a photographer addicted to heroin and cocaine. They meet in the swirl of young professional life in New York City. She is not over the moon about him but is willing to date. He obsesses about her at first, but soon enough, when he thinks about her, it is often in the context of how to hide his drug habit. She discovers his addiction early on. She then begins a campaign to save him, encouraging him to go to therapy and bailing him out of prison. Her reasons for doing so are opaque. As one of her friends said to her, “You’re being driven for reasons we don’t fully understand.” MacIndoe’s perspective doesn’t illuminate the bond between them, unfortunately, for his narrative is consumed with doing drugs, hiding drugs, and life in prison. Stellin plays a bit part amid a cast of people who concern him: his parents and siblings, a jumble of other women. This memoir wants to be a love story but lacks the oomph to achieve it. Instead, what started powerfully eventually meanders, lost, in the pain and confusion of drug addiction. (June)