Love Sick: One Woman's Journey Through Sexual Addiction (review)

Abstract

276Fourth Genre word paragraph: "But now." She goes on to admit her desire to finger over this growing baby wanting "slower unfoldings and unaUoyed shifts. . . . The time I have, I take to look at him ... I need not move toward any task, at that moment, past gazing on the face ofmy child." The phenomenon of motherhood puts the author in connection with the world in a new way. Her reflections include a kinship with mothers and babies everywhere, including the animal world. She is suddenly close to and part of the most elemental and primitive instincts known in the life of animals and humans. She sees her friendships with women anew; the pain and tenderness with which she describes her parting from a close friend who is moving away is one of the more overtly emotional passages in the book. In view ofthese hymns to friendship, it then seems rather strange that her partner in procreation, the baby's father, is but a shadowy presence in the book, and his response to the adventure seems oddly missing. The occasional mention is natural and positive; stiU, there could be more ofhim without losing the focus of the mother's experience. Although the book is implicitly emotional, the intense love felt for the child is more like a bouquet that rises from page after page of clear detail and real things. As Purpura declares in one reflection, "Awe is not precious; it looks to be spent, to be shot away whole, that it might renew." Awe is one of many things a reader can gain from reading Increase. Here we are in the hands of an original-thinking Madonna, one who sees honeycombs in the playpen mesh and bathwater as a silver scarf. She reminds us that the miracle ofbirth is real to someone aU the time, and that everyone, even the murderous terrorist on the evening news, started out as somebody's baby. Reviewed by Susan Lilley Love Sick: One Woman's Journey Through Sexual Addiction by Sue William Silverman W W Norton & Company, 2001 288 pages, cloth, $24.95 "Liquid hot steel night wild dark ice steaming, voice dying, like you could melt glass bone hard, devour a blue universe, prisonerfor eternity. " This, for Sue Silverman, is the language of intoxication. It is how she responds when directed to describe her "addict" self, to examine that selffor what it is. It is the language ofa powerful addiction. The heart ofSflverman's Book Reviews277 new book, Love Sick, is the way that addiction leads to a split self, and the way she ultimately finds a unified self again. Silverman deftly weaves the story of her addiction into the story of her recovery. Her drug of choice was not alcohol or marijuana, heroin or LSD. It was neither an "upper" nor a "downer." It was not even, exactly, a noun. Silverman's drug was, perhaps, better characterized as a verb: an action, a doing, a having: Sue Silverman was addicted to having sex with dangerous men. In the final throes of her addiction, Silverman, while married, spent everyThursday at noon having sex with Rick, a married man, in room 213 of the Rainbow Motel. On one fateful Thursday, however, the ritual was threatened when Rick's son came down with the flu. Silverman met Rick at his house instead ofthe motel, and, while the sick child slept in his room, the two lovers got down to business. When the child started to cry, Silverman struggled with a desperate maternal urge to comfort him, but gave in to her addiction and continued her encounter with Rick. Through this devastating encounter, Silverman realized that her "self"—her very being—had split in two. There was the sober half-—the kind, inteUigent, clear-headed Sue—and there was the addict half—the part of her who would pursue sex with dangerous, unavailable men at any cost. Almost immediately Silverman entered a month-long, in-patient treatment program where she explored and confronted her divided identity among other women fighting similar battles. Love Sick chronicles her experiences in this program: we foUow Silverman through her stormy emotional upheavals, her newfound friendships, her insights, her progresses, her...