About The Book

As a young college graduate a year into treatment with a psychiatrist, Cree LeFavour began to organize her days around the cruel, compulsive logic of self-harm: With each newly lit cigarette, the world would drop away as her focus narrowed on the fierce, blooming release of pleasure-pain as the burning tip was applied to an unblemished patch of skin. Her body was a canvas of cruelty; each scar a mark of pride and shame.

In sharp and shocking language, Lights On, Rats Out brings us closely into these years. We see the world as Cree did–turned upside down, the richness of life muted and dulled, its pleasures perverted. The heady thrill of meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. Adam N. Kohl—whose relationship with Cree is at once sustaining and paralyzing—comes to be the only bright spot in her days.

Moving deftly between the dialogue and observations from psychiatric records and elegant, incisive reflection on youth and early adulthood, Lights On, Rats Out illuminates a fiercely bright and independent woman’s charged attachment to a mental health professional and the dangerous compulsion to keep him in her life at all costs.

Praise

“[LeFavour] exhibits a rare willingness to take the reader into difficult and sometimes unpleasant territory . . . a riveting account of a ‘particular kind of crazy’—namely, the damaged and self-damaging young woman she once was. . . This is a courageous and unsettling memoir, infused with humor as well as pain, and marked throughout by a survivor’s wry insight.” —Daphne Merkin, New York Times Book Review

“In startling, beautiful language reminiscent of Plath, LeFavour details her horrific, masochistic impulses. In one chapter when LeFavour’s sanity wavers, ‘splendid women’ like Plath, Sexton, and Porcia Catonis appear in the psychiatric ward, acting both as ominous harbingers and beacons of hope. A searing, brilliant memoir revealing the therapeutic process and its ability “to turn our ghosts into ancestors.” —Booklist (starred review)

“A searingly eloquent and intelligent memoir.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Riveting . . . The memoir, based in part on medical records relinquished at the final session with [her psychiatrist] Dr. Kohl, chronicles LeFavour’s deepening relationship with him; he served as her confidante and a ‘quasi’ father figure, and she eventually fell in love with him. They both maintained professional boundaries and she honored her agreement to commit herself to a psychiatric hospital when she couldn’t stop the burning. When the ‘lights’ finally came on for this profoundly troubled young woman, she writes, she was able to release her shame and pain, and embrace a future of possibilities.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)