San Antonio Express
Americans go on vacation, but the Irish go "on holiday" - and that's exactly where 27-year-old Rachel Walsh thinks she's going when her father marches her off to a converted monastery in Wicklow called The Cloisters, a drug treatment centre with a reputation for rehabbing rock stars.
"I had visions of sitting round wrapped in a big towel," Rachel says, "of steam room, saunas, massage, seaweed treatment, that kind of thing."But pampering is not part of the Spartan regime and Rachel won't be ordering chilled Perrier as she struggles to overcome her predilection for designer drugs: cocaine, valium, alcohol... the list is long.
The books opens as witty, tart-tongued Rachel reviews her crumbling life as she recovers in her New York apartment from a stomach pumping for "a couple of lines of cocaine, an enlivening drug" she calls it, plus a few too many sleeping pills. Of course she's not addicted. Of course not.
With offbeat humour and deadpan aplomb, she confesses to being in debt, out of work and freshly dumped by her latest love, Luke, as she ponders her father's ultimatum.
"I wasn't defending myself as well as I normally would have. But to tell the truth, my trip to hospital had taken more out of me than just the contents of my stomach. I was not inclined to fight with Dad, which wasn't like me at all. Disagreeing with my father was something I did as instinctively as refusing to sleep with men with moustaches."But she's in no position to refuse her father now, and so she returns to Ireland and a stay at the Cloisters.
Cloaked in denial as thick as the terry robe she had envisioned being wrapped in, Rachel is immersed in humiliating group-therapy sessions, endless chores and excruciating public confessions. But she gradually emerges, however painfully, to stand alone "without crutches."
This is a lunker of a book and the lengthy narratives of the characters at the Cloisters have a drugging effect, but you'll still be intrigued by Rachel as she sorts out her life.
Patti Ross is a Kerville writer.