James Brown

Shocking, bleak, and ultimately elegiac, The Los Angeles Diaries chronicles a legacy of addiction, life-shattering tragedy, and the arc of the author's own difficult career as a writer, in an elegant series of twelve interconnected chapters. Written with neither anger nor self-pity, Brown's memoir ranks as one of the most harrowing to emerge in this genre.

“The Los Angeles Diaries is one of those rare memoirs that cuts deeply, chillingly into the reader’s own dreams. It is a dramatic, vivid, heartbreaking, very personal story of human responsibility and guilt, of alcoholism, of suicide, of marital struggle, of the uncertainties and ambiguities of a writer’s life in modern America. The book is cleanly and beautifully written, and it’s also incredibly moving.”

–Tim O’Brien

“The Los Angeles Diaries is terrific. It’s one of the toughest memoirs I’ve ever read, at once spare and startlingly, admirably unsparing. It glows with a dark luminescence. James Brown is a fine, fine writer.”

–Michael Chabon

“With The Los Angeles Diaries, Brown’s written a beautiful book. It’s a miracle...It’s the balance of agony and grace, of course, that makes life so ferociously interesting. Brown has perfectly captured that balance in this unpretentious, very profound book”

–Carolyn See, Washington Post Book World

“The unfolding tragedy of James Brown’s doomed family, torn apart by drugs, alcohol, madness and suicide, makes one consider the possibility of curse, of haunting. Brown’s compassion for his siblings’ and parents’ demons, seen through the compulsive viciousness of his own addictions, is profound. The Los Angeles Diaries is unsparing and clear-eyed, a heartbreaking story, and yet oddly inspirational, the tale of the last man standing”

–Janet Fitch

“Each chapter shows the tool marks of the well-crafted short story, carefully and even lovingly shaped and polished until it shines...The stories amount to a memoir of stunning intimacy and unforgettable impact.”

–Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Remarkable...Rises above the commonplace to the true art of comprehended pain...the hallmark of Brown’s prose is gravitas. His truths are definitive”

–DeWitt Henry, Boston Globe

“As tragic as Brown’s life has been, the memoir displays neither pathos nor self-pity but elegiac wisdom...How moving is Brown’s Los Angeles Diaries?...I simply gave in and reread it, struck even more by its pain, its beauty, and its craft”

–USA Today

“Searing, gut-churning but ultimately luminous...The Los Angeles Diaries reads like the best – and darkest – fiction...Uncompromisingly bleak yet surprisingly beautiful, a passionate testament not only to how one can survive what should shatter and sunder irreparably, but that one can survive and in surviving, begin anew”

–Baltimore Sun