When she was three years old, Joanna Kadish and her older brother set fire to some of her dolls, inadvertently starting a fire on her parents’ California property that resulted in a call to the fire brigade. It is just one of a host of anecdotes in Kadish’s memoir FLIRTING WITH EXTINCTION that sustain the interest and offer marvelous (and frequently harrowing) insights into love, life, trauma, and acceptance.

Kadish grew up in “cowboy country,” as she puts it—in California’s Central Valley, east of Monterey and on the edge of the Gabilan Mountains. She had nine brothers, and spent her time breaking horses, reading philosophy, and living life. The pursuit of novel experiences—swimming among orcas, say, or trying (and failing) to tame an ornery bronc (with lasting medical consequences)—followed her into adulthood, at which point she attended Berkeley, took hallucinogenics, got married, raised a family, and ultimately divorced. Insights into motherhood and the swinger scene—Kadish writes erotically but not distastefully—are plentiful.

The emotional crux of the book is the terrible death of Kadish’s sons (both victims of the opioid epidemic), which is related here in a mode somewhere between memoir and fiction. Kadish discovered the evils of drugs in the most abrupt way, as one of her sons was arrested for being present when one of his friends wrote antisemitic graffiti on the side of a yeshiva. Only after his sentencing did Kadish realize that he was addicted to fentanyl. The family downsized to afford rehab at an expensive clinic in Southern California, only for Kadish to discover in the kitchen of her home (in a stomach-churningly mundane way) that her son was still getting high. A fatal overdose swiftly followed, and then another—as Kadish’s second son met the same fate. These moving passages are written in the third person, Kadish acknowledging that several pieces in the book are fictional. It is a wise choice, providing a layer of distance while allowing the reader to view the tragedies for what they are: personal horrors, and ones that are well known in every community. For, as Kadish points out, opioids are a scourge of American society, one that gradually destroys lives until users are “unable to connect with people except as a beggar seeking alms.” The “extinction” of the book’s title has a double meaning: when one reads of a mother and a son casually discussing taking heroin as a way of weaning off something even stronger, the extinction of normality that drug use brings becomes crystal clear.

Joanna Kadish’s FLIRTING WITH EXTINCTION is a remarkable, heartfelt memoir that details the author’s varied life, loves, and losses with exceptional poise.

~Craig Jones for IndieReader