Possums Run Amok –a true tale told slant

by Lora Lafayette
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Possums Run Amok is a rollicking, hilarious, at times deeply uncomfortable and dark memoir. With fearless candor Lora Lafayette recounts her life from a delinquent, late 1970's punk rock adolescence, through a manic, crooked transatlantic path to adulthood and her eventual terrifying descent into schizophrenia. Whip smart, daring and inventive, Lafayette navigates the harsh realities of being an adventurous young woman seeking to wrest all the wild joy she can out of life. Her story reveals how blurry the line can be between real and unreal, choice and force. It lays bare the startling lack of empathy and services in society for those in crisis. Her voice is singular, her language full of shining unconventional metaphor. Deadpan and wise, heartbreakingly funny and devastatingly moving, Possums Run Amok is equal parts challenging and entertaining.
 
Check out the fantastic review by Robert Fromberg titled, "A Private Artifact of Public Madness," in the LA Review of Books.
 
An excerpt: 
"I suppose that Possums Run Amok is a memoir. But it reads more like some combination of notebook, fable, and primal scream. It is the fastest book I have ever read. ... [It] occupies an important position on an unsteady precipice between private and public. Its events and perceptions — plenty wild enough to warrant the veil of secrecy — carry the power of thoughts that impose themselves unbearably on a person’s private consciousness. Yet the real power of Possums Run Amok is not that it brings private events into public light, but that it allows the throb of one person’s privacy to reshape the privacy of anyone fortunate enough to read it."
Read the full review here:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/a-private-artifact-of-public-madness-possums-run-amok-by-lora-lafayette/