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Mayhem

A Memoir

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Mayhem

Written by: Sigrid Rausing
Narrated by: Maggie Gyllenhaal
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About this listen

A searingly powerful memoir about the impact of addiction on a family.

In the summer of 2012, a woman named Eva was found dead in the London townhouse she shared with her husband, Hans K. Rausing. The couple had struggled with drug addiction for years, often under the glare of tabloid headlines. Now, writing with singular clarity and restraint, Hans' sister, the editor and publisher Sigrid Rausing, tries to make sense of what happened.

In Mayhem, she asks the difficult questions those close to the world of addiction must face. "Who can help the addict, consumed by a shaming hunger, a need beyond control? There is no medicine: the drugs are the medicine. And who can help their families, so implicated in the self-destruction of the addict? Who can help when the very notion of 'help' becomes synonymous with an exercise of power; a familial police state; an end to freedom, in the addict's mind?"

An eloquent and timely attempt to understand the conundrum of addiction - and a memoir as devastating as it is riveting.

©2017 Sigrid Rausing (P)2017 Random House Audio Biographies & Memoirs Mental Health Parenting & Families Psychology Relationships Drug use

What the critics say

"A profoundly articulate and harrowing memoir of a family grappling with addiction. With love and tenderness, respect and reserve, Sigrid Rausing explores the evolution of her brother and sister-in-law's addiction and its effect on her entire family. Her deftly layered observations about how one can be both knowing and not knowing capture a parent's innate sense of a child's being in danger; one sibling's desperate attempts to save another; and a deeply private family who find themselves suddenly exposed. Ultimately, what Rausing finds is a way to tell her own story, including among objects from the past that remind her of what once was, or might have been. I was impressed and moved." (A. M. Homes)
"In this mesmerizing account of her brother's descent into addiction and her sister-in-law's untimely death, Sigrid Rausing explores sweeping questions about what it means to choose or refuse a moral life; what tragedy looks like when it is woven into privilege; and how we control or surrender to our perceived destinies. Written in elegiac, lyrical prose, Mayhem is deeply passionate in its impossible attempt to adduce a redeeming vitality from an agonizing chaos. This is a brave, elegant, inspired book." (Andrew Solomon)

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