Lights On, Rats Out Lib/E: A Memoir

As a young college graduate a year into treatment with a psychiatrist, Cree LeFavour began to organize her days around the cruel, compulsive logic of self-harm: with each newly lit cigarette, the world would drop away as her focus narrowed on the fierce, blooming release of pleasure-pain as the burning tip was applied to an unblemished patch of skin. Her body was a canvas of cruelty, each scar a mark of pride and shame. In sharp and shocking language, Lights On, Rats Out brings us closely into these years. We see the world as Cree did―turned upside down, the richness of life muted and dulled, its pleasures perverted. The heady thrill of meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. Adam N. Kohl―whose relationship with Cree is at once sustaining and paralyzing―comes to be the only bright spot in her days. Lights On, Rats Out illuminates a fiercely bright and independent woman's charged attachment to a mental-health professional and the dangerous compulsion to keep him in her life at all costs.

About the Author :
Cree LeFavour is the author of several cookbooks. She has PhD in American Studies and taught writing at New York University. Cree LeFavour is the author of several cookbooks. She has PhD in American Studies and taught writing at New York University.

Review :
"A harrowing, beautiful, searching, and deeply literary memoir...a story of true self-salvation and transformation." -- "Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author" "A powerfully, staggeringly honest book that is excruciating in places, and also completely haunting. LeFavour's intimate account of her relationship with her psychiatrist is intensely compelling, forthright, and brave...a fascinating memoir in a category of its own." -- "Dani Shapiro, author of Slow Motion" "A riveting exploration." -- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)" "A searing, brilliant memoir revealing the therapeutic process and its ability 'to turn our ghosts into ancestors.'" -- "Booklist (starred review)" "Cree LeFavour...exhibits a rare willingness to take the reader into difficult and sometimes unpleasant territory...LeFavour's tale is a gritty one...[and] is, among other things, a love story about a dedicated and gifted analyst and his difficult but equally gifted patient..This is a courageous and unsettling memoir, infused with humor as well as pain and marked throughout by a survivor's wry insight." -- "New York Times" "Cree LeFavour's memoir of self-mutilation and temporary insanity isn't for the faint of heart. Rather, it's for anyone who's ever been too scared to feel or too hurt to register pain--in other words, all of us. I don't think I've ever read a more hopeful, searingly intelligent book about the distances we're capable of traveling as we find our way back to the light." -- "Adam Ross, author of Mr. Peanut" "Eloquent, irreverent, graphically precise." -- "Vulture" "LeFavour uses the force of her blisteringly stark, mesmerizingly self-aware prose to not only unearth her own demons but also equip the reader with the language to articulate our own as well." -- "Harper's Bazaar" "Meticulously constructed from detailed physician notes and her own journals, the book is both disturbing and deeply cathartic...A searingly eloquent and intelligent memoir." -- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)" "Shockingly intimate." -- "People" "With chilled, unflinching precision, in Lights On, Rats Out, Lefavour lays bare her struggles with self-mutilation, chronicling a terrifying clash between mind and flesh. A vivid, unsettling, and powerful read." -- "Jonathan Miles, author of Want Not"