The Rooms of Heaven : A Story of Love, Death, Grief, and the Afterlife

Mary Allen is a master. I am Jim Beaman, to great extent. I am addicted to most anything I like, and I KNOW how the PULL of the demons feels. Mary captures that...she knows it, as she was addicted to the addictive personality. She loved him. It shows. As does her aching, crying grief. And every point of human emotion along the wide scale. Her love of Iowa...and the University, and writing...all come to life, in this tale of death, despair...and return, recovery. Jim Beaman loved you, Mary. I do too.

Mary Allen has written an important book about drug addiction, its effect on the life of not just the addict, and how "co-dependency" makes it all that much "easier" for the addict and those are closest to the addict, continue on their destructive paths. Then Ms. Allen describes to us her own brief visit into the realm of mental illness and her obsessive search for what ever remains of her ill-starred love, Jim Beaman, as a spirit or "shade". To have revealed as much as Ms. Allen has about her own problems took a great deal of courage, I think. If the reader is looking for a lot of "New Age" nonsense about the afterlife and her experiences in attempting to contact the spirit of Jim Beaman, you won't find it here! If Ms. Allen is anything at all, it's thoughtful and level-headed. She is not prone to flights of New Age fancy . But she does show us just how ephemeral the human spirit can be. I can't recommend this book too highly. It may not "satisfy" the "sensationalist seeking" reader fixated on learning all the "nuts and bolts" of Ms. Allen's attempts at after-death communication with the shade of her deceased lover, and just how successful she was. But this book was never intended to be that kind of book. It was written in a "literary style", it raises importatant questions of human spirituality, and is as "down-to-earth" as Ms. Allens' adopted Iowa.

The first half of Mary Allen's "The Rooms of Heaven," with its perfect sense of pace and detail, is one of the best openings to any memoir I've ever read. You'd have to look to Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" or Tobias Wolff's "This Boy's Life" to find anything comparable. But, as remarkable as the opening is, it is the second half, with its rise into the afterlife, that goes beyond anything I've ever read, and here Allen has no rivals. I was completely blown away by this stunning memoir.

Mary has succeeded in bringing her "Jim" to the attention of the world, so that it could not go on spinning, oblivious to his arrival or departure. He was here. They were in love. Now he's gone. It hurts! He existed!!! What a loving memorial to him, to their love, to the pain everyone suffers at the hands of addiction. A powerful and honest memoir of a love that really did occur in this world, in Iowa City. I wish Mary love in her future life as an outstanding author. The book is spellbinding. I couldn't put it down, out of sheer respect for the couple!

This book is richly detailed and yet concisely pared down, a page-turner of the most unusual variety. Allen's culling of facts and incident has great passion but importantly reflects her years of contemplation afterward. It is profoundly felt and refuses sensationalism, wherein I think lies the feeling of its being so "true". The prose is wonderful, a tall drink of cool water on a hot day. I could not put it down, or stop thinking about it afterwards.