Feverland

“Lemon’s bold decision to eschew narrative allows him to portray a sense of life as he lived it, with the blending of memory, sensory immediacy, and hopes and fears in a waking nightmare. In taut, vibrant prose, he pieces together the fragments of his life … His sparkling language and repeated motifs provide unity, and there is profound insight—even humor—in this tale from the dark side.”

“What a marvel of a book. In its rigor, variance, and sonic playfulness, Feverland makes a winning argument for the case that a life—in all its trial, tenderness, and physical troubling—is best presented in shards, as the title indicates. Why? Because these vivid and surprising shards that Alex Lemon gives us teem with heft and life, evocative diction and sticking image, narrative brilliance and lyric mystery.”

“Feverland is a life turned on its head and dissected so that each ugly thing, each shiny bobble, each meanness, each fury of need, each ache, each bloom of love is laid bare for us. Alex Lemon has offered us an essential long stare into the bleak yet textured truth of illness, abuse, and disability; at the same time he offers us the one thing we all cling to despite it all: beauty and survival. Lemon’s intense and stratified essays lean in and tell us the hardest thing we’ve ever heard, then embrace us so tightly we think we might burst from the sheer joy of being alive.”

“Alex Lemon doesn’t write sentences—he writes songs. And when you’re not marveling at the jazzy vocals, nodding along to the swing beat, applauding for the slant rhymes and digressive riffs, you’ll be genuinely moved and shattered by these poetic fragments of a life that add up to a beautiful mosaic.”

“I didn’t read Feverland—I plunged into it. Alex Lemon’s mind comes at you in a hot, mad rush, and you experience him as you experience your own past, all at once. A good memoir leaves you feeling that you know another person. This one, somehow, leaves you feeling that you know yourself as well.”