‘I felt my cheeks burn, an ache of desire to help him somehow, and the scintillating thrill of seeing someone so raw and revealed in their instability. I recognized myself in him, my hidden self-assault completely transparent in his open wounds.’ 

They say a broken person can’t love wholly, but maybe there is someone else whose wreckage fits perfectly with their own. They complete each other: one decent human made from two deviants.

Krishna is a self-described child abuser and addict. Then she meets Levi, his body carved with knife wounds to illustrate his inner turmoil and alcoholic depravity. Two Sociopaths in Love is the author’s raw recollection of a year roped to Levi’s twisted fate. But at heart it’s a celebration of once-in-a-lifetime truest love.

Krishna embraces the codependent obsession of helping Levi get sober: through days- long detox where he lies immobilized by sedatives, to the ER for repairs of the self-harm he inflicts when intoxicated, in and out of recovery homes and then enclaves of street people. She is lured by the potential she sees and Levi’s alternative universe of insanity where he says what he thinks without filters and acts out his libidinous desires without shame.

There are so many cross-references of addiction and mental illness between them, but Krishna is thirteen years older and relatively rehabilitated at mid-life. Levi, 33, has bounced from his Fundamentalist Christian upbringing to juvenile delinquency and prison, lost custody of his son and favor with his family. He’s a black out drunk who can’t recall his own actions of beastly impropriety. His self-restraint blurs when left alone with Krishna’s teenage daughter. Soon after the real trouble begins, so why is it that Krishna’s devotion doesn’t stall or even slow?

The book has the racing pace and story line of women’s literary fiction, but it’s an entirely true story with enough salacious sexual details to draw a male readership. It has been consistently compared to Mary Carr, Frank McCourt and The Glass Castle, with a narrative frame moving from the immediacy of the love affair to the protagonists’ ancient trauma histories, informing their desperate drive to be together instead of alone in haunting alienation and pain.