Book Description

This memoir of a relationship with a self-destructive woman is “as elemental, lyrical and cringe-inducing a love story as they come” (Kirkus Reviews). Suspenseful, darkly funny, and devastating, this is Eli Hastings’s true story of his troubled, decade-long relationship with his friend Serala. At family events, Serala wore saris and ate delicately from plates of curry. But elsewhere, she wore a lip ring, designer shades, and a cowboy hat; would regularly drink frat boys under the table; would sleep less than five hours a week; and would place herself in dangerous situations for another bag of heroin. Serala’s complex character and seemingly haphazard choices are brought to vivid life, from ill-advised quests for narcotics in Mexican border towns to unplanned fifty-hour road trips from Los Angeles to New York City. Although her dark and traumatic journey concluded tragically at age twenty-seven, Hastings writes with a sense of hope and tenderness in this “drug, romance and adventure-filled” memoir of their unique relationship (The Seattle Times). “An unflinching account of how it feels to be young and flirting with the abyss in America. The narrator’s observations as he and his friends ride rough across the U.S.A., all pulled to orbit around their friend, lover, and lost soul, Serala, are also an investigation into the dangerously different ways that people respond to addiction. This is an elegy, yes, as if told by a boy who began his quest tutored by Kerouac’s ghost, but became, on this hard road, a man schooled in love by the spirit of the Dalai Lama.” —Rachel Rose, author of Giving My Body to Science