Drive Me Out of My Mind

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.