Review: Crazy Love, by Leslie Morgan Steiner

Sometimes, people who seem to have it all on the outside really have almost nothing to hold onto on the inside. In fact, their very affluence and intelligence act as a shield hiding their actual situations from the world. This can lead to deadly consequences, as it almost did in Steiner's case.

Crazy Love is the memoir of a woman who grew up with every financial benefit. Her family lived in affluence, in a high-class part of the country, with a summer home and trips to foreign countries to perfect accents. Unfortunately, underneath it all was a mother who had succumbed to the family trait of alcoholism and a father who rarely was away from his high-profile job. Steiner herself was an exceptionally odd combination of drinker and A-student, a girl who had sex for drugs, whose mother would call her The Washington Whore. Even more exceptionally, Steiner graduated, got into Harvard, overcame her addictions, and graduated to move to NYC as a writer and editor for Seventeen magazine.

Steiner protected her new life carefully, never forgetting for a moment her past and her ideas of people's opinions of her, which swirled in her mind as she carefully crafted her conversations with her friends and family. Even at this level of success, she still internalized her mother's words, and her fears of what others thought of her. She stayed away from men, celibate for four years, and kept her nose down. It was this combination of destructive internal monologue and successful-girl-from-good-family that made her a perfect target for Conor, who was in much the same situation. The difference between them was, his anger and fear of his past destroyed his ability to be safely close to women, a secret that Steiner learned painfully at his hands increasingly over the years.

In her memoir, Steiner explains how Conor separated her from her friends and family, extracted her from her beloved city and career, and literally beat her into submission. As many abusers do, he carefully played on her insecurities, and her desperate desire to have make a family where she could be loved and safe. He lured her in, and once she had nowhere to go, the beatings and threats began, continuing for years, until one night when the intervention of a neighbor during one of Conor's rages was the only thing that saved her life. Steiner picked herself up and left, not without looking back multiple times, and not without losing even members of her own family in the process.

Her strength is obvious, even during the worst of the situation, and that's what makes her tale so incredible. She very successfully debunks the idea of the beaten woman as uneducated or unintelligent, and shows how even the smartest, most determined women can be pulled in. Her story is extremely absorbing.

While I think it's inappropriate to comment too far on a memoir like this, where the author is working through what happened to her, I can say that I wish there had been more of some things and less of others. Steiner goes into a lot of detail, which sometimes was skimmable, but leaves out parts of the end of the story that would have been interesting to know, such as whether she has been able to restore any relationship with the family that betrayed her during her divorce, or how the settlement itself ended up - there was a potential for her having to support him rather significantly, and of his getting part of her family's property; did that happen?

While I can't say I enjoyed the book, because you can't enjoy reading a tale like this, I can say that it was very, very well-told, and I read it in one day. Every time I put it down, I was thinking about what was coming, and hurrying to get back. The back story on her family, and her subsequent realizations about her actual relationships with them, were extremely interesting. Steiner herself has since remarried and had a family, and her remarkable story will stay with me for a long, long time.

Review: four out of five stars - incredible story of the fight to survive, both mentally and physically