Overview

2023 Oregon Book Award Finalist in Creative Nonfiction Possums Run Amok is a rollicking, slyly hilarious, at times uncomfortable and dark memoir wherein the author and two friends are nicknamed The Possumettes. With fearless candor, Lora Lafayette recounts her life from a delinquent, late 1970s punk rock adolescence through a crooked, manic, transatlantic path to adulthood and her eventual terrifying descent into schizophrenia. Whip smart, daring, and inventive, Lafayette navigates the harsh realities of being a risk-taking adventurous young woman while seeking to wrest all the wild joy she can out of life. Her story reveals how blurry the line can be between real and unreal, choice and force. It lays bare the startling lack of empathy and services in society for those in crisis. Her voice is singular, her language full of shining unconventional metaphor. Deeply uncomfortable, laugh-out-loud funny, and devastatingly moving, Possums Run Amok is equal parts challenging and entertaining.

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9781634059947

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Reviews

Possums Run Amok is hypnotic, pulsing forward with the intensity and blood of a racing heartbeat. Lora Lafayette's impressionistic and candid prose illuminates wild punk escapades, grim hitchhiking journeys, and devastating slips into mental illness. This memoir is a breathtaking and daringly original fever dream. I don't know another writer with such a remarkable ability to intertwine tragedy and ecstasy. --Sarah Priscus, author of the forthcoming Groupies. Lora Lafayette's Possums Run Amok is Huck Finn in a mosh pit, an indefatigably rapid tour from a wise and relentless narrator through more chaos and joy and madness and release in each paragraph than would seem possible for any book or any life. This important and necessary book is all you need to know about what happens when blinding energy beats repeatedly against the constraints of normalcy. Read this book. --Robert Fromberg, author of How to Walk with Steve With Possums Run Amok, Lora Lafayette has delivered a kinetic, irreverent memoir retold as fearlessly as it was lived. It stuns with its clarity and disarms with its honesty. It is also heartbreaking in its humanity. Wry, incisive, and deceptively witty, Lafayette's odyssey whisks us into adventure, while challenging us to reexamine our own definitions of freedom, self, and agency. A brilliant, daring book you won't be able to put down, nor soon forget. --Bobby Johnston, acclaimed film composer and author of The Saint I Ain't: Stories from Sycamore Street

Author Information

Lora Lafayette's writing has appeared in such publications as Plazm Magazine, The Buckman Journal, and Pen & Ink. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, with Finn, who purrs. She still travels the world, though not quite so frenetically as she used to.

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