The Booksmith (Venue Partner)
1644 Haight St
415.863.8688
This event has passed.
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Alex Lemon
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- When
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Thursday Mar 25, 2010 (7:30pm)
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Alex Lemon is a thirty-year-old professor, critically acclaimed and award-winning poet, and recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He’s also an ex-college baseball star, ex-rampant partier, and a survivor of multiple strokes and seizures due to a vascular malformation in his brain stem and an extremely dangerous surgery designed to correct it. He tells his incredible story in Happy. As a freshman in college, Lemon was the hard-partying dude everyone called “Happy.” Then he had his first stroke. For two years, he coped with his deteriorating health by drowning himself in alcohol and drugs, his charming and carefree exterior masking his self-destructive behavior as he endured two more brain bleeds and overwhelming sadness. After he miraculously survived the tremendously risky surgery, Lemon’s free-spirited mother nursed him back to health, once again teaching him to stand on his own. Happy is an electric, hypnotic self portrait of a young man confronting mortality and the limits of his own body; it is also the deeply moving story of a mother’s redemptive and healing powers.
