The Late Great Me could easily have been published as a "young adult problem novel" … since that's the audience which will primarily listen to the Late Great Me whose name is Geri. She's one of the post-pot teenagers who switched to juice, inadvertently really, after her first date, attractive Dave, introduced her to wine. Before that, alone with her only two friends … she'd been most unpopular with nothing to do except feed her resentment of [her] mother…. In time, she and Dave switch to Scotch and some nondescript sex. Only her teacher Kate Laine, an AA, spots her at once, offers her the help she keeps refusing although she does attend one boring meeting of the ten rules and twelve steps, while she goes on drinking, gaining weight, hoping to lick the problem alone, and witnessing one awful happening after another (her brother's dog is run over—by them; Dave's mother, also a lush, chokes on her own vomit). This, then, is one of those eye-opened candids with a kind of confessional volubility you'll not find hard to keep up with—the flip side of a record you're hearing more and more.
A review of "The Late Great Me," in Kirkus Reviews (copyright © 1975 The Kirkus Service, Inc.), Vol. XLIII, No. 22, November 15, 1975, p. 1304.
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