"A memoir can be great for many reasons, but one quality matters more than all the others—brutal, uncomfortable honesty. That's what's inside this book. Moreover, Cocaine's Son confronts a brutal, uncomfortable question: How do you forgive someone for their mistakes if those mistakes are the only relationship you have?"
—Chuck Klosterman

Join New York Times contributor Dave Itzkoff as he delivers a reading and talk on his new memoir.

About the book:

He was such an elusive and transient figure that for the first eight years of my life I seem to have believed my father was the product of my imagination. Thus begins New York Times journalist Dave Itzkoff's searing memoir Cocaine's Son. With sharp wit, self-deprecating humor, and penetrating honesty, Itzkoff turns a keen eye on his life with the mysterious, maddening, much-loved man whose addiction defined his transition from childhood to adulthood.

Itzkoff's father was the man who lumbered home at night and spent hours murmuring to his small son about his dreams and hopes for the boy's future, and the fears and failures of his own past. He was the hard-nosed New York fur merchant with an unexpectedly emotional soul; a purveyor of well-worn anecdotes and bittersweet life lessons; a trusted ally in childhood revolts against motherly discipline and Hebrew school drudgery; a friend, advisor, and confidant. He was also a junkie. In Cocaine's Son, Itzkoff chronicles his coming of age in the disjointed shadow of his father's double life—struggling to reconcile his love for the garrulous protector and provider, and his loathing for the pitiful addict.

Through his adolescent and teen years, Itzkoff is haunted by the spectacle of his father's drug-fueled depressions and disappearances. In college, Itzkoff plunges into his own seemingly fated bout with substance abuse. When his father finally gets clean, a long "morning after" begins for them both. And on a road trip across the country and back into memory, in search of clues and revelations, together they discover that there may be more binding them than ever separated them.

Unsparing and heartbreaking, mordantly funny and powerfully felt, Cocaine's Son clears a place for Dave Itzkoff in the forefront of contemporary memoirists.

About the Author:

Dave Itzkoff is a reporter on the culture desk of The New York Times and the lead contributor to its popular ArtsBeat blog. He is the author of Lads and has written for numerous publications, including GQ, Vanity Fair, Details, Wired, Elle, Spin, The New York Times Book Review, and New York magazine, which published the essay from which this book is adapted. He now has a great relationship with his father.

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