Happy: A Memoir - Readings

Description

His freshman year of college, Alex Lemon was supposed to be the star catcher on the Macalester College baseball team. He was the boy getting every girl, the hard-partying kid everyone called Happy. In the spring of 1997, he had his first stroke. For two years Lemon coped with his deteriorating health by sinking deeper into alcohol and drug abuse. His charming and carefree exterior masked his self-destructive and sometimes cruel behavior as he endured two more brain bleeds and a crippling depression. After undergoing brain surgery, he is nursed back to health by his free-spirited artist mother, who once again teaches him to stand on his own. Alive with unexpected humor and sensuality, Happy is a hypnotic self-portrait of a young man confronting the wreckage of his own body; it is also the deeply moving story of a mother’s redemptive and healing powers. Alex Lemon’s Technicolor sentences pop and sing as he writes about survival—of the body and of the human spirit.

About the Author

Alex Lemon's poetry collections include Hallelujah Blackout (2008 Milkweed Editions) and Mosquito (Tin House Books 2006). A memoir is also forthcoming from Scribner. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous magazines including AGNI, BOMB, Denver Quarterly Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Pleiades and Tin House. Among his awards are a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He is the co-editor of LUNA: A Journal of Poetry and Translation and is a frequent contributor to The Bloomsbury Review. He teaches in the English Department at TCU in Fort Worth, TX.