I Will Be Complete: A Memoir

'Equally subtle and shocking, as clear-eyed about how the sins of the parent are visited on the child as it is generous and loving . . . You cannot read it and remain unchanged.' Irish TimesRaised rich in Southern California before his father lost a fortune and his parents divorced, the novelist Glen David Gold grew up with his increasingly wild and self-destructive mother amid conmen and hedonists in 1970s San Francisco. When he was twelve, his mother took off for New York without telling him: it was time, he decided, to rescue himself.This is the mesmerising story of how Gold survived his childhood and how it shaped him as an adult, as he forges doomed romances, strives to become a writer and repeatedly to rescue his mother from her catastrophic downward spiral – until he recognises that unless he breaks free he will never be complete.'Funnier and more hopeful than any story about a child's abandonment and a parent's descent into terrifying chaos has a right to be.' The Times'Smart, generous and gripping' New Statesman'A heartbreaking, brave book' Psychologies'A banquet of vivacity, shrewdness and wit' Washington Post'Extraordinary . . . an audacious, boundary-shattering work' Los Angeles Times