CONCRETE DREAMLAND

Hard knocks in a gritty metropolis.

This accomplished visual artist’s vibrant self-portrait is filled with memorable reflections on creativity, addiction, and tragedy. Dougher’s father and grandfather were heavy drinkers, and the author himself was “already an alcoholic” at seven. As a teen, he learned that his recently deceased father had killed his own father, according to a family friend, but “covered it up to make it look like” suicide. Along with these traumatic disclosures, there’s abundant raw humor. A young Dougher once woke to find his amorous cat (Satan) trying to have sex with “my nappy afro.” The cat’s interest waned when he cut his hair, he jokes. Growing up biracial, he had frequent, sometimes violent, encounters with white racists. Solace came via fortuitous gifts—watercolors, drums—and TV matinees. His Brooklyn neighborhood was “perfectly quiet” for two hours on Saturdays, every kid inside watching a martial arts movie on a local station. Afterward, they rushed outdoors, where “we kicked and chopped one another.” In the 1970s and ’80s, he fell into the punk scene, played drums in hitmaker Sade’s band, and had guns pointed at him by cops and civilians alike. He mixed with famous and infamous figures. In Manhattan’s bohemian Tompkins Square Park, he chatted with “a timid, nerdy White guy” who turned out to be the Talking Heads’ David Byrne and had a bizarre brush with a man who later committed a murder that shocked the city. Dougher “drank and drugged daily” for two decades. Attending hundreds of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings helped him get sober. His writing about recovery features some cliches—he’s “a work in progress” on a “sober journey”—but this book teems with life, never more so than in his powerful account of working as an art therapist for children born with HIV.

A moving, modest, sometimes hilarious account of self-discovery.