With You or Without You by Domenica Ruta

     Of course I'll sound like an idiot, but I'm going to use the word anyway.  Radiant.  This writing in this book is radiant.  That's the word that kept springing to mind when I first started reading this memoir, and yet it makes no sense, since it's about a frequently dark albeit often funny childhood and young adulthood.  Not until I finished the book did I figure out why I kept thinking the word:  This book completely makes apparent, lights up, reveals, radiates, if you will, a specific life at a level that most memoirs do not.  Actually, two lives, since the book is about her mother as much as herself, and it's no spoiler to tell you so, as the mother is quite a character.  Most books about the development of an addiction show much less self-knowledge as well as much less awareness of the causes and course of that addiction, and yet without the unpleasant sense of self-importance that is so frequently found in this genre.  Plus it was SO well written!  Oh, did I say?  And funny too.  Hard to put down.  Ok, I'll stop repeating myself and go away, but I'm just saying....I'd read anything written by Domenica Ruta from now on out!