- Hardcover: 319 pages
- Publisher: Alfred a Knopf (Feb 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0679454608
- ISBN-13: 978-0679454601
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 15 x 3.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,494,363 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Rooms of Heaven
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
A memoir that is intimate and gripping, literary and suspenseful, The Rooms of Heaven is a love story, an anatomy of a suicide, an account of grief and healing, and a wholly original exploration of life after death.
At its center is Mary Allen, seeking a new beginning in Iowa City. There she meets Jim Beaman--smart, handsome, charming--a workingman who defies the stereotypes: he has a lightning wit, he draws and sculpts, he makes chess sets out of clay.
"It's hard to explain," Allen writes, "what it's like when you're attracted to someone as suddenly and fiercely as I was to Beaman, what it is about him that makes you fall in love with him." But she does explain, and we see the beginnings of an intense love affair: "We talked about everything and nothing, his childhood and my childhood, people we'd slept with and people we hated, death and college and dreams."
There's more to this relationship, however, than a simple love story. Jim Beaman, it turns out, has a drug problem, and Allen gets drawn into the world of addiction, with its promises and denials, good intentions and inevitable disappointments. Then Jim kills himself.
"Stories about somebody dying usually end with the death," notes Allen, but this time "death is not the end of the story." Convinced that Jim must be somewhere, "that a person, that Jim Beaman, was more than a complex piece of machinery, reduced now to a pile of ashes in a cardboard box," she embarks on a riveting, sometimes funny, often terrifying investigation of the landscape of the afterlife--a journey that leads her to (perhaps) contact with Jim, to the brink of madness, and, ultimately, back to herself.
In prose of astonishing originality, The Rooms of Heaven captures the beauty of the American heartland, the transformative power of love, and the "terrible magic" of death.
At its center is Mary Allen, seeking a new beginning in Iowa City. There she meets Jim Beaman--smart, handsome, charming--a workingman who defies the stereotypes: he has a lightning wit, he draws and sculpts, he makes chess sets out of clay.
"It's hard to explain," Allen writes, "what it's like when you're attracted to someone as suddenly and fiercely as I was to Beaman, what it is about him that makes you fall in love with him." But she does explain, and we see the beginnings of an intense love affair: "We talked about everything and nothing, his childhood and my childhood, people we'd slept with and people we hated, death and college and dreams."
There's more to this relationship, however, than a simple love story. Jim Beaman, it turns out, has a drug problem, and Allen gets drawn into the world of addiction, with its promises and denials, good intentions and inevitable disappointments. Then Jim kills himself.
"Stories about somebody dying usually end with the death," notes Allen, but this time "death is not the end of the story." Convinced that Jim must be somewhere, "that a person, that Jim Beaman, was more than a complex piece of machinery, reduced now to a pile of ashes in a cardboard box," she embarks on a riveting, sometimes funny, often terrifying investigation of the landscape of the afterlife--a journey that leads her to (perhaps) contact with Jim, to the brink of madness, and, ultimately, back to herself.
In prose of astonishing originality, The Rooms of Heaven captures the beauty of the American heartland, the transformative power of love, and the "terrible magic" of death.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Hardcover
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.
Format:Hardcover
Mary Allen could have easily been preachy in this book. "You do drugs?!? Look at what happens!" But instead she concentrated on the love story aspect of it. Although a main part of the book/plot does involve drug/alcohol abuse, it's shown as being integrated with their lives, not as seperate entities. It does lead you to hate drug abuse, but not by Mary Allen telling you to, but by the way you can see the role it played in tearing apart two people who loved eachother. Love was the main theme here, drug abuse and alcoholism were peripheral beings. I liked this book so much, I thought this love story was amazing and would leave anyone longing for their own significant other.
Format:Hardcover
As a survivor of three suicides, I was eager to read a book with some substance. The beginning of the book was written very well. Mary is an excellent writer, however, she really missed out on the expression of her gut retching pain emotions that result after a suicide. She sort of skipped over those feelings and lived in this denial world. I have grown extremely in my spiritual realm as the result of the suicides that have touched my life. And I can tell you, the aching, can't get out of bed emotions were definitely not expressed in this book. Perhaps they are still too painful for Mary to write about, thus the jumping from one time period to the next. The gift of spiritual knowlege gained from a suicide was not presented in this book. I was quite disappointed.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
No New Age Nonsense Here!
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... Read more
Published on 21 July 1999
A Remarkable, Stunning Memoir
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. Read more
Published on 12 April 1999
Unabashed, Unforgettable
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. Read more
Published on 8 April 1999
Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional...
Mary Allen's suffering made me wonder if she was merely stuck in the "moratorium" state of her own development since meeting/knowing/grieving over the loss of her... Read more
Published on 3 April 1999
Nothing like what I expected!
I was expecting something new in the afterlife field and was dissapointed!!! The author rambles on and on, takes you back and forth in time settings sometimes you don't know... Read more
Published on 31 Mar 1999
Too many questions, not enough answers
I really wanted to like this book. Its premise looked so unusual and thought provoking. Ultimately though I could never really connect with who Jim Beamon was or who Mary Allen... Read more
Published on 28 Mar 1999
A gift of honesty straight from the author's heart
This is Mary Allen's true story of life during her brief love affair with an addicted man. It is a story of love,death, and searching for life's hidden truths. Read more
Published on 26 Mar 1999
Unforgettable
This suspenseful and elegantly written book seized my attention and wouldn't let go even after I finished reading it. Read more
Published on 25 Mar 1999
Brilliantly depicts emotional landscape of suicide survivor
Mary Allen describes the emotional landscape of the suicide survivor better, and with less sentimentality, than any other current author. Read more
Published on 17 Mar 1999
Doomed romance
Something was off-putting in the tone of this book. Perhaps it comes from lines like "I love when working-class people say smart things. Read more
Published on 3 Mar 1999
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