Sweet
Fire
– This is my first novel, based loosely on experiences I had as a
young woman with a serious drug problem.
Purchase online or order through your fvaorite bookstore.
Sweet Fire Reviews
Kirkus
Reviews
Precisely plotting the slippery slope of a heroin addict's existence,
MacEnultyıs debut paints a bleak picture but still manages to include
a ray of hope. The sweet '70s are young, and 18-year-old Trish is a newlywed,
but that doesn't stop the Florida judge from sentencing her junkie husband
Charlie to ten years for stealing stereos. She grieves by immediately
seeking out a fix, and before she knows it she's hooked herself. There
follows a long sojourn in the slough of despond as she and her friends-in-need
work small scams to score, head to California in search of better highs,
move back to Florida, shoot up and nod off every chance they get-until
death gets some of them. First to go is Carrie, one of Charlie's ex-girlfriends,
who kills herself after Trish steals money from her. Then there's Big
Steve, Trish's California lover, who ODs a week after getting out of jail.
Various rehab efforts initiated by her brother and mother, a concert violinist,
fail, and Trish takes off for Miami, living with another wasted lover
while selling herself to a Cuban drug dealer and even going to college—until
she visits her sugar daddy one night and finds him with his throat slit.
Finally, she gets involved in a hard-core burglary scheme targeting pharmacies,
which works well until the police catch on and she finds herself in a
courtroom looking at a judge for sentencing. She gets only three years,
but while in the pen she also gets clean and learns the true story of
her unknown father, after which something clicks, so that in spite of
a slight (though near-fatal) relapse, Charlie's release, and the death
of the wasted lover—an early AIDS victim—Trish still has a shot
at putpast behind her. A frank, moving depiction of a nightmarish slice
of American life.
The
San Diego Union - Tribune; San Diego, Calif.; Jan 5, 2003;
Tiffany Lee-Youngren;
Sweet Fire
Pat MacEnulty Serpent's Tail, 320 pages, $14
Redemption also hums just out of reach in Pat MacEnulty's first novel;
only her central figure seeks the company of a needle and nothing, no
one else.
MacEnulty has constructed a gritty and sorrowful book about a young girl with an appetite for the damage done. “Sweet Fire” annihilates preconceived notions — a child of the '70s, Trish comes from a broken but still functional family, and she's witty, articulate and street-smart enough to know better than to get caught up chasing the dragon. But once Trish gets her first taste of “sweet fire,” her life unravels faster than a rush of blood to the head. In an arc of self-destruction, her cross-country wanderings take her from drug dens to rehabs to prison, with a few bleary-eyed months spent in Ocean Beach, trying to score from Tijuana barrios.
Maddeningly obstreperous even in her moments of clarity, Trish lives and breathes smack. She crosses paths with a series of dope- sick men, all of them looking for love in the barrel of a needle, none loyal enough to her to trade a high for a chance at something real. Trish's self-hatred wrenches the heart: Fed up and looking to kick, she convinces herself that her friends would be better off without her — “I would be one less arm to feed.”
Literary embellishment has no place in a book this stark. MacEnulty's writing is as straightforward as cinder blocks — square, unadorned phrases reminiscent of prison-veteran-turned-author Edward Bunker. Trish's take on the world is tragic and rueful, and not once does she glorify the tough life she has chosen for herself.
“When I look back on those days,” she says, “I feel like I'm watching a scary movie — the kind where you're always yelling at the girl not to go into the house or not to open that closet door. ... But just like the girl in the movie, I always go back into the house where the maniac is waiting, and I am both the maniac and the girl.”
Guardian
Unlimited, Saturday Feb. 1
Sweet Fire
by Pat MacEnulty
(Serpent's Tail, £8.99)
Sweet Fire frames that anguished question: why would the girl who has
it all think the meaning of life lies in sticking a needle in her arm?
Pat MacEnulty writes about her subject with sympathy, wisdom and —
an unexpected blessing — humour. It is the 1970s, and a girl of Trish's
age should be off to college, in this case at her cultured musician mother's
expense. Alas, having just seen her young husband put away for 10 years
on a narcotics rap, Trish skedaddles with a constantly reshuffled pack
of reprobate companions on a heroin-fuelled Route 66 journey to ruin.
We are spared no detail of her sordid descent, but Trish remains an engaging
character whose innate, if often subdued, grain of goodness and interest
in humanity keeps the reader on her side. Against the odds, Trish declines
to blame anyone for her calamitous state. All she wants in life is the
sweet fire of the title, because the “hummingbird kiss of the needle”
is the most wonderful experience she knows.
Hephzibah Anderson rounds up first novels from Goldberry Long, Susan Perabo, Conrad Williams and Pat MacEnulty (The Guardian Unlimited) “MacEnulty can write and if Sweet Fire smacks of art-as-therapy, her lean, easy prose propels her story beyond the personal, making for more than convincing fiction.”
A
junkie comes of age
South Florida Sun-Sentinel Oline Cogdill, June 8, 2003
Sweet Fire
Pat MacEnulty
Serpent's Tail. $14. 320 pp.
Trish is a junkie, and getting high is all she thinks about. It's on her
mind when she's with her parents, visiting friends or in court, watching
her husband of three months being sentenced to prison for 10 years.
It wasn't much of a marriage for this 18-year-old — “... by the second month, he'd been sentenced to the drug program for the stolen stereo, then we spent two weeks on the run and the last two weeks back at our parents' ... after Charlie got picked up by the cops.” While Trish says she's determined not to let heroin rule her life, drugs reign whether she's in her hometown of Jacksonville or on the road.
In this graceful, unflinching novel, Pat MacEnulty meticulously develops the story of people on the edge fighting to regain a foothold to life. As Sweet Fire chronicles the life of an addict, the author makes us care deeply about this young woman coming of age during the 1970s. No matter how low Trish sinks, MacEnulty imbues Sweet Fire with a sense of hope and Trish with a candor that makes her appealing and likable, despite any reservations one has about the life she has chosen.
Trish's recurring relationship with drugs becomes the one constant in her life. “I fell in love with heroin, which had made life both easier and harder.” Her addiction makes it easy for her to get involved with one loser boyfriend after another. While hustling keeps her on the move from Florida to California to Mexico, a new career opportunity arises — robbing drugstores.
Without sentimentality or pop psychology, the author richly explores what led Trish to drugs. Her father is an alcoholic college professor and poet who abandons his family early; her mother, a concert pianist, is the daughter of two alcoholics. “She's spent her life living with alcoholics,” Trish says about her mother. “Two parents. Two husbands. Living with a dope fiend is probably easier. At least I'm not violent when I'm high.”
Sweet Fire is the kind of novel that has found a home with the edgy London publisher Serpent's Tail. The publisher continues to stretch the boundaries of crime fiction and novels holding to its mission of introducing “extravagant, outlaw voices neglected by the mainstream.” Sweet Fire falls into no category, which something that most major American publishers tend to avoid. Sweet Fire is part novelized memoir, part crime fiction, part coming of age.
MacEnulty, a former Sun-Sentinel staffer who often contributes freelance book reviews from her North Carolina home, has based the story on her own experiences. Sweet Fire is a tough, uncompromising story that at the same time hinges on the belief that people can change their lives.
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