Why Nothing is More Satisfying than an Addiction Memoir

And why ‘The Love Story of the Century’ is one of the best I’ve read

The Finnish writers Märta and Henrik Tikkanen and their children, 1966.

This week, I picked up a book that has languished in my towering to-be-read stack for a year. It’s called The Love Story of the Century and it was written in 1978 by Finnish-Swedish author Märta Tikkanen, translated by Stina Katchadourian, and republished in 2020 by Deep Vellum. The book is a novel-in-verse about living with an alcoholic, based on the author’s experiences with her writer husband, Henrik Tikkanen, and I read it in one gulp, until two in the morning.

How I love reading about love. Not thirty pages in, I took to the internet to see a photo of the pair. I found a few black-and-white images of Märta, fair and pretty, and Henrik, who had a handsome ruggedness and looked like trouble. There was one color photo of them together at a party in 1975, she in a floor-length denim dress. I peered at their faces, looking for evidence of struggle.

For years, I’ve collected books, films, and songs about living alongside alcoholism and addiction. And I’ve always wondered why there weren’t more. Most stories about addiction are hero’s journeys. They’re typically written by the addict himself. They have a conventional — predictable — arc. Usually: childhood, first taste of chosen…