Lithium for Medea

"Kate Braverman's Lithium for Medea is jumpy, kinetic, and finally very powerful, a deeply felt piece of work by a very gifted young writer." —Joan Didion

Lithium for Medea is a tale of addiction: to drugs, to physical love, to dysfunctional family chains. It is also a tale of mothers and daughters, their mutual rebellion and unconscious mimicry.

Rose grew up with an emotionally stunted, narcissistic mother while her father, a veteran gambler, spent his waking hours in the garden cut off from his wife’s harangues. Now an adult, Rose works her way through a string of unhealthy love(less) affairs. After a brief, unhappy marriage, she slips more deeply and dangerously into the lair of a parasitic, cocaine-fed artist whose sensual and manipulative ways she grows unable to resist. Kate Braverman’s story is a drug that leaves one’s perceptions forever altered. Lithium for Medea sears us with Rose’s breathless, fierce, visceral flight.