Thursday, May 21, 2009

Crazy Love-Leslie Morgan Steiner

Crazy Love
Leslie Morgan Steiner
St. Martin's, Apr 2009, $24.95
ISBN: 9780312377458

Twenty-two years old recent Harvard grad, Leslie obtains a job at the magazine Seventeen. On the Manhattan train she meets a nice Wall Street investment banker thirtyish Conor. They begin dating and become engaged. Together just under a year, five days before their wedding, Conor smacks Leslie for cursing at her computer. She goes ahead and marries him, but he continues to hit her. She stayed with him for two years before deciding love was not enough because he will never overcome his violent Boston childhood. The final straw was a horrific beating in which he left her unconscious.

Mindful of a profound scene from the Charlie Sheen movie Good Advice in which the advice columnist answers a woman who asks what to do as her spouse is physically abusive but her family insists she has to save her marriage while the columnists insists she should save her life. This is an intense from the heart memoir that looks at the psychology of why "battered woman" even highly educated females remain in potentially deadly relationships when intellectually they know they must leave. Well written and extremely deep, some of the true life scenes described are so stunning, a reader will want to deny they happened as Leslie Morgan Steiner provides a powerful look into abuse and why a person stays in a dangerous harmful (physically and mentally) relationship.

Harriet Klausner

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