Drunken Angel: A Memoir

By Alan Kaufman

Alan Kaufman has been compared to Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Hubert Selby Jr., even Ernest Hemmingway—his life reads so much like a great movie that the world of cinema has just optioned his first memoir, Jew Boy, for a feature film. Drunken Angel, his new autobiographical work, drops like a sledgehammer. It is the most gripping, chilling and inspiring account ever written of a life-long battle with alcoholism and the struggle to write. Graphic in its grit, an education in pain, Drunken Angel is being hailed as "the Naked Lunch of memoirs." The book chronicles Kaufman’s headlong plunge into the piratical life of a literary drunk, and takes us shamelessly through noirish alleyways of S&M sensuality, forbidden pleasures and pitfalls of adultery, the thrilling horrors of war, plus raging poetry nights, mental illness, homelessness, literary struggle and his strange, magnificent rise into a sobriety of personal triumph as crazily improbable as the famous and notorious figures he meets along the way. Drunken Angel contains revealing portraits of such literary figures as Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, Barney Rosset, Anthony Burgess, Elie Wiesel, Ron Kolm, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jim Feast, Bernard Malamud, Hubert Selby Jr., Bob Holman, Sapphire, not to speak of the gutter dreamers, Nuyorican Poets, Unbearables, Babarians, Slammers, Black foot Indians, commandos, criminals, junkies, renegade cocktail waitresses, hoboes, painters, and a host of others who each in some way, big or small, play their part in peopling the wildly exilerating drama of Kaufman’s passionate and exotic life. Whether the addiction be booze, women, violence, writing or fame, Kaufman honors us with an explicit honesty that only a writer of enormous power and artistic greatness can attain, and his life, as Drunken Angel poignantly shows, is a profoundly meaningful quest for truth and spiritual values.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Apr 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781936740475

Reviews for Drunken Angel

[lorimarie_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I've been waiting to read some other reviews of this book because I kept thinking: "Is it me or is this guy kind of creepy?" I need to read some of his other books and some of his poetry to understand why anyone even likes this person or what he's written. What I found was a sex crazed narcissist that I did not like at all. With each new conquest I found myself rolling my eyes and being more and more disgusted that anyone would act that way let alone put it all down on paper to be proud of. I felt sorry for the women he portrayed as animals. I always feel that if I don't like the main character it's hard for me to like the book. This book was extremely difficult because I knew it was true and about a real man. I kept thinking, just wait till he gets sober and it will get better. But it didn't. More abusive sex and more name dropping. It's hard to imagine all this happened in one man's lifetime. I feel bad because I'm just an ordinary reader and Mr. Kaufman is a world renowned author, but if he's a creep that's that, I don't like what he wrote because I don't like the way he lived his life. Unfortunately it doesn't even seem like his main problem was the drinking.

[vasquirrel · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is one of those books about which I made a mental u-turn halfway through. About a 100 pages in and I HATED this guy - Kaufman. Really despised him, had no respect for him as a writer or a human being. I almost quit this book, but I gutted it out until "Part Two", and I GOT IT. Kaufman despised HIMSELF in the first half of the book, and, why not? He was a miserable drunk, user of women and friends, and a walking waste of potential. As he considers recovery, I was sold - sold on Kaufman's talent as a writer and humbled by his willingness to bare his personal rock bottom in such a way that his own self-loathing becomes visceral to the reader. This memoir is just REAL. To quote the cover blurb from Dave Eggers, "He's not neat, he's not careful...But there's more passion here than you see in twenty other books combined."

[poetontheone · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kaufman's biography is vivid and wild, the material of his life always veering to extremes such as his sojourn to Israel and subsequent service in the Israeli Defense Force, to his crippling alcoholism and mental illness. For all this, gripping as it was, it felt like something was lacking. Though I know recovery saved Kaufman's life, and his art, I felt like the art and the literary life was underplayed in the narrative to pay more focus to Kaufman's descent into alcoholism and his salvation from it. Many memoirs walk a line between the great pathos of human weaknesses and the power and importance art, and perhaps these two things are generally inextricable. This memoir favored the former in its concentration, and I suppose I would have preferred more of a balance.

[maryann12_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The book chronicles Kaufman’s headlong plunge into the piratical life of a literary drunk, and takes us shamelessly through nourish alleyways of S&M sensuality, forbidden pleasures and pitfalls of adultery, the thrilling horrors of war, plus raging poetry nights, mental illness, homelessness, literary struggle and his strange, magnificent rise into a sobriety of personal triumph as crazily improbable as the famous and notorious figures he meets along the way.Whether the addiction is booze, women, violence, writing or fame, Kaufman honors us with an explicit honesty that only a writer of enormous power and artistic greatness can attain, and his life, as Drunken Angel poignantly shows, is a profoundly meaningful quest for truth and spiritual values.As engrossing, moving and honest a literary memoir as one will ever read, Drunken Angel is that rare combination of aching beauty and haunting truth, all made vivid and alive with a poetry that is both turbulent and profoundly wise. Alan Kaufman takes his readers on a Jewish Huck Finn journey of addiction, regret, and rage. With his immense literary gifts as a storyteller, he turns the jagged, jaded tale of his life into a true work of art, and along way finds the reconciliation and peace that made this memoir possible, and for that, we should all be grateful.