A book that weaves together many discrete strands into a one cohesive, wonderful read. A story that addresses family dysfunction, queer outsiderness, drug addiction, being a foreigner in a foreign country and your own, and that also serves as a chronicle of the pandemic years. Some of episodes, such as the cold turkey attempt in Luxor, are genuinely funny and appalling at the same time; others are truly upsetting. Yet Roche’s prose is so well constructed, and the whole book pulses so much with warmth and love, that this is never the misery memoir it could so easily be in other, less dextrous hands. An exceedingly readable, deftly written chronicle of a complex life.
