Susan J. Miller grew up in Washington Heights, New York, in the 1950s in a family whose lack of money, roots, and happiness appeared to have no definable cause. When she turns twenty-one, her father's casual revelation of his fifteen-year heroin addiction brings vertiginous uncertainty to every memory but is also the key to her past. By means of a structure that subtly circles and repeats -- generating powerful momentum -- she retraces the innocence and deceptions of a childhood lived at a distance from a crucial truth.

This is a breathtaking work. The brilliantly woven narrative hums with greater and greater intensity as its pieces come into conflict: her father scoring drugs in Harlem and thrilling to bebop jazz at Birdland, her mother's blank-eyed depression, moments of unbearable tension at the oilcloth-covered table in her grandmother's kitchen, her brother's helpless rage, and conversations between a father and daughter who in many ways are more alike than they realize, bound by a shared if not fully acknowledged history. Poignant, lyrical, and incisive, this work constitutes an ingenious inquiry into the construction of self.

About the Author
Susan J. Miller lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and their two children. Excerpts from her memoir have appeared in Harper's and Granta. This is her first book.

Comments
"This fascinating, emotionally complex, intimate, and fatal family memoir is Susan J. Miller's dazzling debut, and she has perfect pitch. Never Let Me Down never lets you down." -- Richard Rhodes, author of A Hole in the World and The Making of the Atomic Bomb

"In the beat tradition one step removed, this absorbing memoir by a daughter struggling to understand and make peace with her father's life as a junkie offers a rare view of New York's jazz-and-drug scene of the 1950s. A moving examination of a troubled working-class Jewish family by a daughter who got out and got well." -- Helen Epstein, author of Children of the Holocaust