＊ 美國新聞週刊評選《Happy》為一月最佳選書！

＊ 美國國家圖書館雜誌的編輯嚴選好書！

這是作者Alex Lemon的故事。他原本是馬卡萊斯特大學的足球隊的風雲人物，女同學心目中的白馬王子，但一場大病奪走他的風采迷人，推他走向憂鬱之路，最後卻靠守護在他身邊的藝術家母親不斷指導他，讓他重新站起來。這是一部作者戰勝病魔和一位母親救回兒子的感人傳記。

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 who everyone called Happy, often without even knowing his real name. 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.

 

 

"Alex Lemon takes his reader inside the terror and strangeness of illness -- and gives us, along the way, a loving portrait of a devoted, wonderfully nutty mother. Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity." -- Mark Doty, author of Dog Years and Fire to Fire

"The pyrotechnic prose of Alex Lemon's memoir creates an electrifying portrait of a body in crisis, and the way the soul is inexorably, reluctantly, dragged along.... If ever a book was written in blood, it is this one." -- Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

"Happy unfurls like gauze, revealing not a wound, but a series of intricate and beautiful scars. Alex reminds us that though we can't make it through this life unscathed, we can make it through transformed." -- Robin Romm, author of The Mercy Papers and The Mother Garden