Rob Roberge. (2016). Liar: A Memoir. Crown.

Rob Roberge. 2016. Liar: A Memoir. Crown.

Rob Roberge, Liar: A Memoir. Crown, 2016.

Rob Roberge. Liar: A Memoir. Crown, 2016.

OverDrive Product Record

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1. • value: relationships
2. • value: concussion
3. • value: Biography
4. • value: recovery
5. • value: Los Angeles
6. • value: autobiographies
7. • value: guitarist
8. • value: Storytelling
9. • value: sex
10. • value: Addiction
11. • value: struggle
12. • value: alcoholic
13. • value: clean
14. • value: Relapse
15. • value: girlfriends
16. • value: Identity
17. • value: intense
18. • value: bipolar
19. • value: Autobiography
20. • value: Suicide
21. • value: Memoirs
22. • value: memory
23. • value: drug addict
24. • value: alcohol
25. • value: bipolar disorder
26. • value: biographies
27. • value: addict
28. • value: Humorous
29. • value: Music
30. • value: mental illness
31. • value: rock and roll
32. • value: memoir
33. • value: CTE
34. • value: musician
35. • value: black comedy
36. • value: literature
37. • value: narrative
38. • value: Dark Humor
39. • value: drugs
40. • value: lies
41. • value: memory loss
42. • value: biographies and memoirs
43. • value: concussions
44. • value: manic depression
45. • value: urinals
46. • value: Literary gifts
47. • value: autobiography books

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Roberge, Rob
   • bioText: ROB ROBERGE is the author of four books of fiction, most recently The Cost of Living (2013). He teaches creative writing and his work has been widely anthologized. He also plays guitar and sings with the Los Angeles-based band the Urinals.
   • name: Rob Roberge

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2016-02-09T00:00:00-05:00

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title

Liar

fullDescription

An intense memoir about mental illness, memory and storytelling, from an acclaimed novelist.
 
When Rob Roberge learns that he's likely to have developed a progressive memory-eroding disease from years of hard living and frequent concussions, he is terrified by the prospect of becoming a walking shadow. In a desperate attempt to preserve his identity, he sets out to (somewhat faithfully) record the most formative moments of his life—ranging from the brutal murder of his childhood girlfriend, to a diagnosis of rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, to opening for famed indie band Yo La Tengo at The Fillmore in San Francisco. But the process of trying to remember his past only exposes just how fragile the stories that lay at the heart of our self-conception really are.
 
As Liar twists and turns through Roberge’s life, it turns the familiar story of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll on its head. Darkly funny and brutally frank, it offers a remarkable portrait of a down and out existence cobbled together across the country, from musicians’ crashpads around Boston, to seedy bars popular with sideshow freaks in Florida, to a painful moment of reckoning in the scorched Wonder Valley desert of California. As Roberge struggles to keep addiction and mental illness from destroying the good life he has built in his better moments, he is forced to acknowledge the increasingly blurred line between the lies we tell others and the lies we tell ourselves.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of Children and The Chronology of Water
   • content: "I've never read a book more intimately devoted to articulating how tenuous our hold on identity is. Identity is made, unmade, remade by chasing memory, and memory is a series of emotional intensities we barely survive. We make up stories of ourselves to bear the weight of our actual lives. We live between those stories and events coming at us like catastrophic meteors. And yet, mercifully and sporadically, love comes. Read Rob Roberge's memoir, Liar. Because life is what happens between truth and the fictions we make to withstand it."
2. • premium: False
   • source: J. Ryan Stradal, New York Times bestselling author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest
   • content: "Uncompromising and deeply affecting, Liar is a brilliantly fragmented, darkly humorous account of a lifelong struggle with addiction and mental illness that stands with Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes. Strip-mining his memories for veins of truth, Rob Roberge unearths a fractured, unholy, and undeniable work of brilliance."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Dan Marshall, author of Home Is Burning
   • content: "Wow, what an amazing book. Blunt, brave, sad, funny, and full of heart, Rob Roberge's jaw-dropping journey through life makes you feel all your feelings, some of which you didn't even know you had."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Emily Rapp, author of The Still Point of the Turning World
   • content: "Rob Roberge's Liar is an unforgettable story, but what sets this stunning memoir apart is the unforgettable voice. Roberge interrogates memory with an ardent desire to be good and to do right. A deeply moral and complicated book, it comes from the heart of a man who writes about love, loss, and addiction like no other writer. You'll fall in love."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Booklist
   • content: "Roberge's memoir is [an] engrossing read....A fascinating book that will remain with readers for some time."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: "In this absorbing memoir, novelist Roberge (The Cost of Living) shifts among memories of his youth, drug-fueled episodes from his young adulthood, and recent relapses into addiction that threaten his marriage and his work as a college professor...The sense of urgency in Roberge's writing is increased by his effective use of the second person...The rapid back-and-forth mirrors to some degree the diagnosis of bipolar disorder with rapid cycling, which he first received in the 1980s. But it is also the way Roberge is best able to try and make sense of his world and his experiences."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander
   • content: "Roberge's writing is both drop-dead gorgeous and mind-bendingly smart." --Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild "Roberge is the bard of the rough road, singer of the long haul, both lyrical and ferociously realistic"
8. • premium: False
   • source: Steve Almond, New York Times bestselling author of Against F
   • content: "Roberge is a modern master of the down-and-out-that-just-got-worse. His stories are dark and thrilling. They take hold of the reader like some bad, bracing dope and don't let go until you feel the full measure of your own humanity. Prose this carefully wrought and true puts him in the tradition of Bukowski, Hammett, and Denis Johnson."
9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     December 14, 2015
     In this absorbing memoir, novelist Roberge (The Cost of Living) shifts among memories of his youth, drug-fueled episodes from his young adulthood, and recent relapses into addiction that threaten his marriage and his work as a college professor. Adding to that, he learns that he has a disease that erodes memory. The sense of urgency in Roberge’s writing is increased by his effective use of the second person: “More and more you are realizing that if you are ashamed of certain things you did when you drank and used drugs, you are ashamed of who you are with mental illness.” The rapid back-and-forth mirrors to some degree the diagnosis of bipolar disorder with rapid cycling, which he first received in the 1980s. But it is also the way Roberge is best able to try and make sense of his world and his experiences. Through the pain, he sees that “it’s the bad parts that make you realize how good the great parts are.” Agent: Ryan Harbage, Fischer-Harbage Agency.

10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      November 15, 2015
      It would be hard to imagine a less reliable narrator for this disjointed memoir, but the shaky perspective adds to the emotional power and unflinching honesty. Before writing this memoir, Roberge published four works of fiction (The Cost of Living, 2013, etc.), and he has continued to teach creative writing at the university level while playing guitar in a punk-rock band. He has also battled anxiety attacks and a bipolar condition with prescribed medication and self-medication, suffered a series of concussions that doctors fear have already caused brain damage, has been in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous, and has hit a bottom so low that, as recently as six years ago, all he was "capable of writing [were] suicide notes. In nine months...forty-seven suicide notes." By "you," he means himself, establishing an intimacy with readers through the use of the second person, confessing more here than he previously has to many who have known him, loved him, or worked with him. "After attempting to hide your mental illness from most of the people in your life since your late teens, in the end you fall apart in a very public forum," he writes. Through a series of chronological leaps and flashbacks that defy linear logic, the story proceeds from the unsolved murder of a childhood friend, through his sexual awakening and fetishes, his series of girlfriends and passing sexual conquests, his marriage to a woman who became very ill and whose pain medication he stole, and the blackouts and lies with which he has attempted to come to terms. It's actually surprising to readers who have crawled through all this wreckage when he remarks toward the end, "you've been clean and sober for nineteen of the last twenty years." The bleakness of the preceding pages offers few glimmers of such redemption, which the author notes is fragile and might be transitory. Roberge acknowledges his editor for helping "find the book within the book," but that book still has a cut-and-paste quality as it arbitrarily leaps back and forth across decades.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      December 15, 2015
      Depending on where your life is at the moment, has been, or never will be, Roberge's memoir is a depressing, tough, engrossing read. He's bipolar, he's a junkie, he's an alcoholic. He's also a professor, an author, and a guitar player. In this thoughtful exposition of his life, he jumps from year to year, from youth to current day and everywhere in between. With his medical condition, his brain is not always under control, and it's spooky to read about, especially when Roberge writes in the second person ( You've had, more or less, a nervous breakdown ). Interspersed with his own tales are extinctions of animals, suicides of people famous and not, and CTE, the controversial brain problem caused by concussions and suffered by football players, boxers, and Roberge. Yet somehow he survives, he cleans up, he marries, he becomes a success. He is so much more than an addict, yet it's easier for him to let people believe that than to admit he is bipolar; it's a question of control versus no control. A fascinating book that will remain with readers for some time.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

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When Rob Roberge learns that he's likely to have developed a progressive memory-eroding disease from years of hard living and frequent concussions, he is terrified by the prospect of becoming a walking shadow. In a desperate attempt to preserve his identity, he sets out to (somewhat faithfully) record the most formative moments of his life—ranging from the brutal murder of his childhood girlfriend, to a diagnosis of rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, to opening for famed indie band Yo La Tengo at The Fillmore in San Francisco. But the process of trying to remember his past only exposes just how fragile the stories that lay at the heart of our self-conception really are.
 
As Liar twists and turns through Roberge’s life, it turns the familiar story of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll on its head. Darkly funny and brutally...

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