Lithium for Medea

Lithium for Medea is a tale of addiction: to drugs, physical love, and dysfunctional family chains. It is also a tale of mothers and daughters, their mutual rebellion and unconscious mimicry. Rose grew up with an emotionally crippled, 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 addicted to in the bohemian squalor of Venice.

KATE BRAVERMAN is a native of Los Angeles who grew up surrounded by the counterculture of San Francisco. She has published several novels, including The Incantation of Frida K. (2002), Wonders of the West (1993), Palm Latitudes (1988), and Lithium for Medea (1979), books of poetry—Postcards from August (1990), Hurricane Warnings (1987), Lullaby for Sinners (1980), and Milkrun (1977)—and a collection of stories, Squandering the Blue (1990). She won the O. Henry Award in 1992.