Chancers

April 11, 2016
This unengaging memoir is narrated in turns by Stellin, a freelance writer who is an on-again-off-again girlfriend of and self-described guardian angel to MacIndoe, a photographer addicted to heroin and cocaine. They meet in the swirl of young professional life in New York City. She is not over the moon about him but is willing to date. He obsesses about her at first, but soon enough, when he thinks about her, it is often in the context of how to hide his drug habit. She discovers his addiction early on. She then begins a campaign to save him, encouraging him to go to therapy and bailing him out of prison. Her reasons for doing so are opaque. As one of her friends said to her, “You’re being driven for reasons we don’t fully understand.” MacIndoe’s perspective doesn’t illuminate the bond between them, unfortunately, for his narrative is consumed with doing drugs, hiding drugs, and life in prison. Stellin plays a bit part amid a cast of people who concern him: his parents and siblings, a jumble of other women. This memoir wants to be a love story but lacks the oomph to achieve it. Instead, what started powerfully eventually meanders, lost, in the pain and confusion of drug addiction.

April 15, 2016
The unconventional love story between an emerging author and the troubled man she discovers to be a hard-core drug addict. Journalist Stellin (How to Travel Practically Anywhere, 2006) and photographer MacIndoe co-narrate their journey from their first flirtatious interaction to his release years later from a short prison term on drug charges and the restarting of their life together. Stellin first met the Scottish MacIndoe in 2002 at a Montauk summer share house; they reunited in 2005 when she was in need of an author photo for a commissioned travel guidebook. Their attraction swiftly became an "obsessive, indulgent connection, which excluded the rest of the world," as poetic emails were romantically exchanged and a spontaneous trip to Hawaii brought them even closer. During that trip, MacIndoe, an unsuccessfully detoxed addict, had been rationing sips of methadone and cloaking light drug use from Stellin. As his casual fixes regenerated into the full-blown "dark hole" of heroin and crack he'd battled prior to meeting Stellin, MacIndoe's physical appearance and erratic, quick-tempered behavior revealed voracious dependency that both sabotaged his relationship and landed him at Rikers Island. Stellin's painful indecision about the fate of their relationship and MacIndoe's desperate drug-chasing, regret, and resolution to enter rehab are revealed in thoughtful, carefully crafted chapters brimming with personal details and sentiments. Written with great dexterity and fairness, both authors narrate from their individualized perspectives, vacillating over the blooming of their passion and the painful heartbreak and incremental deterioration of their romance. While long-winded in sections, both sides are elegantly and tactfully interpreted. Stellin's sections are the most compelling, as she wrestles with loving a junkie, respecting herself, and navigating the red tape and legal confusion of MacIndoe's prison sentence. Emotionally resonant and evenly structured, their tandem chronicle resists overly romanticizing their bittersweet interactions to focus on the dedication and devotion necessary to make their already-complicated relationship survive the fallout of critical hardships. An emotionally complex and intensely personal binary memoir of addiction and sustainable love.

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