I Will Be Complete A Memoir

From the bestselling author of Carter Beats the Devil and Sunnyside, a shocking, big-hearted memoir about his bizarre upbringing in California in the 1970s and how he survived it. 'Equally subtle and shocking, as clear-eyed about how the sins of the parent are visited on the child as it is generous and loving . . . You cannot read it and remain unchanged.' Irish TimesRaised rich in Southern California before his father lost a fortune and his parents divorced, the novelist Glen David Gold grew up with his increasingly wild and self-destructive mother amid conmen and hedonists in 1970s San Francisco. When he was twelve, his mother took off for New York without telling him: it was time, he decided, to rescue himself.This is the mesmerising story of how Gold survived his childhood and how it shaped him as an adult, as he forges doomed romances, strives to become a writer and repeatedly to rescue his mother from her catastrophic downward spiral - until he recognises that unless he breaks free he will never be complete.'Funnier and more hopeful than any story about a child's abandonment and a parent's descent into terrifying chaos has a right to be.' The Times'Smart, generous and gripping' New Statesman'A heartbreaking, brave book' Psychologies'A banquet of vivacity, shrewdness and wit' Washington Post'Extraordinary . . . an audacious, boundary-shattering work' Los Angeles Times 'I Will Be Complete is the best memoir I've read in years. It's likely the best memoir published in years.' Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life and Chang and EngFrom the bestselling author of Carter Beats the Devil and Sunnyside, a shocking, big-hearted memoir about his bizarre upbringing in California in the 1970s and how he survived it. Glen David Gold grew up rich on the beaches of 1970s California, until his father lost a fortune and his parents divorced when he was ten.Glen and his English mother moved to San Francisco, where she was fleeced by a series of charming con men and turned increasingly wayward. When he was twelve, she took off for New York without telling him, leaving him to fend for himself. On midnight streets and at drug-fuelled parties, wise-cracking his way through an alarming adult world, Glen watched his mother's countless, wild attempts to reinvent herself. In this exceptional memoir, acclaimed novelist Glen David Gold captures his bizarre, lonely upbringing and how it shaped him as an adult with stunning insight and unsparing candour. Shocking, mordantly funny and achingly affecting, he tells an unforgettable story of the years he spent trying to rescue his mother - and his ultimate realisation that only by breaking free could he ever hope to be complete.'The prose is crystalline, hard as real diamonds, flashing, revealing. The story is simple, just a boy and his mother's long disintegration, but the journey is darkly complicated, heartbreaking, beautiful as hell.' Mark Childress, author of Crazy in Alabama