Drive Me Out of My Mind

Book excerpt: Drive Me Out of My Mind is a coming-of-age story of wildness and wandering set primarily in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan—its abandoned iron mines, desperate small towns, and heart-breaking bars. It’s the memoir of a boy raised by lawless and itinerant women and how he was cultured—and corrupted—by their hard-living, hard-drinking, and hard-loving ways. Given this lot in life, Faries tells how one boy was hurt into becoming a poet at the ripe age of two—to imagine another world other than the daily madness in front of him—a world where violent stalkers hovered over the hospital beds of women as they gave birth, where father figures also copulated with Gramma, where a worn Barbie doll was a main source of comfort, and where home meant 24 anonymous hovels in 10 years.