http://www.vogue.com/culture/article/beach-reads-you-cant-put-down-the-summers-best-new-literary-thrillers/

The Fantastic and Mr. Fox:
Helen Oyeyemi on Her New Folktale-Inspired Novel

http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/the-fantastic-and-mr-fox-helen-oyeyemi-on-her-new-folktale-inspired-novel/

Touching piece by Janine di Giovanni I just read in my issue of Vogue. I might have to download the book. 

Reporter Janine di Giovanni returned from the front lines to face another battle at home: her husband’s alcoholism and treatment.

My husband, Bruno, and I had settled down in Paris. Magazines came to interview us, two war correspondents who had finally made a home. Why Paris? they asked.

“We wanted to feel safe.”

Why was it, then, I still did not feel safe?

“Do you think,” I said to Bruno one night, “that this stuff really fucked us up for good?”

“What stuff?”

“All of it. The graves, the fires, the bombs. Did it hurt us?”

After a while, he finally answered me. “How could it not?” 

When the body breaks down, it does not all go at once; it goes piece by piece. First it was Bruno’s back—20 years of hauling a camera and sleeping on floors. Then his entire immune system seemed to cave in. His two bouts of African malaria came back. Once, in Abidjan, he had a crisis during the coup d’état. It was curfew, and no doctor could get to his house. So he lay in bed alone, in his sarong, sweating and freezing, sweating and freezing, with a drip hooked up to him. He says he does not remember drinking water or eating or getting up to go to the bathroom. Someone took a photograph of him lying in a bed of sheets soaked with sweat, his fever rising, his head damp, and his limbs splayed. I hated that photograph.

Once we took a taxi together to a depressing hospital outside Paris when he felt another bout of malaria was coming. He asked me to leave him there, to go home, to take care of the baby, because he felt he had to do it alone. We took pictures of the two of us in a photo booth downstairs in the hospital before the nurses took him away. I am wearing a white wool hat; he is trying to make me laugh because he knows I am worried.

Then the malaria passes, and he is smoking two packs of Camel non-filters a day. Now he is not eating. Now he is really drinking heavily. Sometimes I say something. “Do you have to open another bottle? We just had one.”

He lights cigarettes off the end of each other, a chain of nicotine. “Let me handle it myself.”

If you read books about alcoholics, there is always a scene—cinematic, almost—where the end comes crashing down. Where something gives way to something bigger. Ours came in the late summer, around the time when Paris Plages, the beach set up by the city council, draws crowds of people to the edge of the Seine. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant in the Fifth. Bruno had already been drinking. At dinner he drank several more margaritas, more wine. Then he got on the motorcycle.

“I think maybe you shouldn’t drive,” I said.

He handed me my helmet. “I’m fine.”  

We drove along the quay, the summer air hitting me in the open place that my helmet did not cover. He drove fast, weaving in and out of cars. I wondered what would happen if the bike skidded, if we fell, if my head smashed like a melon. Our son, Luca, at home, was innocently asleep, waiting for his parents to come home.

“Slow down,” I said. 

Rest of the article: http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/in-love-and-war/