Lights On, Rats Out, Cree LeFavour
Lights On, Rats Out, Cree LeFavour
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Lights On, Rats Out
A Memoir

Author: Cree LeFavour

Narrator: Cree LeFavour

Unabridged: 10 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/01/2017

Synopsis

As a young college graduate a year into treatment with a psychiatrist, Cree LeFavour began to organize her days around the cruel, compulsive logic of self-harm: with each newly lit cigarette, the world would drop away as her focus narrowed on the fierce, blooming release of pleasure-pain as the burning tip was applied to an unblemished patch of skin. Her body was a canvas of cruelty, each scar a mark of pride and shame.In sharp and shocking language, Lights On, Rats Out brings us closely into these years. We see the world as Cree did―turned upside down, the richness of life muted and dulled, its pleasures perverted. The heady thrill of meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. Adam N. Kohl―whose relationship with Cree is at once sustaining and paralyzing―comes to be the only bright spot in her days.Lights On, Rats Out illuminates a fiercely bright and independent woman’s charged attachment to a mental-health professional and the dangerous compulsion to keep him in her life at all costs.

About Cree LeFavour

Cree LeFavour is the author of several cookbooks. She has PhD in American Studies and taught writing at New York University.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jason on October 24, 2017

[This was also published at my blog, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.] Regular readers know that I've been seeing a therapist for the last couple of years, which started as a free side benefit of a coding bootcamp I attended in 2015 but that I've since expanded into her private prac......more

Goodreads review by Castille on May 03, 2017

To be honest, I'd give it a 3 because I just liked it. But I'm bumping it a star to make up for the ridiculous other ratings. It's rubbish that other commenters have found FAULT with the character/author's back story. Here's the simple matter: if you're someone who regularly critiques films or liter......more

Goodreads review by Valerity (Val) on July 10, 2017

When I first began reading this memoir by Cree LeFavour titled, "Lights On, Rats Out" it became so utterly brutal, describing how she would go through her ritual of self-harming, almost without preamble that I wasn't really prepared for it. I considered quitting the book, something I rarely do... as......more

Goodreads review by Cook Memorial on March 29, 2018

Recommended by Rob. Check our catalog: [URL not allowed]......more

Goodreads review by Laura Anne on October 14, 2017

Perhaps the best mental health memoir I've ever read. I liked this book better than both Prozac Nation and Girl, Interrupted. I felt that it came full circle in a way that most mental health memoirs never do. Maybe it's because recovery is something you must work on everyday until years pass and befo......more

Quotes

“A harrowing, beautiful, searching, and deeply literary memoir…a story of true self-salvation and transformation.” Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author

“Shockingly intimate.” People

“LeFavour uses the force of her blisteringly stark, mesmerizingly self-aware prose to not only unearth her own demons but also equip the reader with the language to articulate our own as well.” Harper’s Bazaar

“Eloquent, irreverent, graphically precise.” Vulture

“Cree LeFavour…exhibits a rare willingness to take the reader into difficult and sometimes unpleasant territory…LeFavour’s tale is a gritty one…[and] is, among other things, a love story about a dedicated and gifted analyst and his difficult but equally gifted patient..This is a courageous and unsettling memoir, infused with humor as well as pain and marked throughout by a survivor’s wry insight.” New York Times

“Meticulously constructed from detailed physician notes and her own journals, the book is both disturbing and deeply cathartic…A searingly eloquent and intelligent memoir.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A riveting exploration.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A searing, brilliant memoir revealing the therapeutic process and its ability ‘to turn our ghosts into ancestors.’” Booklist (starred review)

“A powerfully, staggeringly honest book that is excruciating in places, and also completely haunting. LeFavour’s intimate account of her relationship with her psychiatrist is intensely compelling, forthright, and brave…a fascinating memoir in a category of its own.” Dani Shapiro, author of Slow Motion

“Cree LeFavour’s memoir of self-mutilation and temporary insanity isn’t for the faint of heart. Rather, it’s for anyone who’s ever been too scared to feel or too hurt to register pain—in other words, all of us. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more hopeful, searingly intelligent book about the distances we’re capable of traveling as we find our way back to the light.” Adam Ross, author of Mr. Peanut

Awards

  • Amazon Best Book of the Month
  • Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books
  • New York Times Pick
  • Harper’s Bazaar Pick
  • Vulture.com Pick
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