Orangutan: A Memoir

Few people who have been slave to an addiction as vicious, as destructive, and as unrelenting as Colin Broderick's have lived to tell their tale. Fewer still have emerged from the darkest depths ofalcoholism--from the perpetual fistfights and muggings, car crashes and blackouts--to tell the harrowing truth about the modern Irish immigrant experience.

"Orangutan"is the story of a generation of young men and women in search of identity in a foreign land, both in love with and at odds with the country they've made their home. So much more than just another memoir about battlingaddiction, Orangutan is an odyssey across the unforgiving terrain of 1980s, '90s, and post-9/11 America.

Whether he is languishing in the boozy squalor of the Bronx, coke-fueled and manic in the streetsof Manhattan, chasing Hunter S. Thompson's American Dream from San Francisco to the desert, or turning the South into his beer-soaked playground, Broderick plainly and unflinchingly charts what it means to be Irish inAmerica, and how the grips of heritage can destroy a man's soul. But brutal though "Orangutan" may be, it is ultimately a story of hope and redemption--it is the story of an Irish drunk unlike anyyou've met before.

"From the Trade Paperback edition."

COLIN BRODERICK was raised Irish Catholic in the heart of Northern Ireland. In 1988, at the age of twenty, he moved to the Bronxto drink, work construction, and pursue his dream of becoming a writer.For the next twenty years, as he drank himself into oblivion: there were failed marriages, car wrecks, hospitals and jail cells. Few people who have been a slave to an addiction as vicious, destructive, and unrelenting as Broderick's have lived to tell their tale.Orangutan is the story of an Irish drunk unlike any you've met before. Broderick has written a play, Father Who, and published articles in The Irish Echo, The Irish Voice, and The New York Times.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

COLIN BRODERICK was born in Birmingham, England, but raised Irish Catholic in the heart of Northern Ireland. He lived briefly in London before moving to New York to start his career as a carpenter. His first wife bought him his first typewriter when he was 22 and living in San Francisco; he was back in New York and a recovering alcoholic by the time he was 23. Colin has written for the The New York Times, The Irish Voice, and Irish Echo and published a short story in Rattapallax. He is now sober and lives in New York City with his wife and child.

From the Trade Paperback edition.