Possums Run Amok: A True Tale Told Slant

It’s clear from the first pages of Possums Run Amok that this isn’t a traditional memoir in style or pace. Chapters are rapid-fire glimpses into experiences that beg for deeper reflection but instead generate mostly questions before hurtling on to the next episode. It’s also clear this is a story cleverly told, in creative, often truncated, prose.

Lora Lafayette describes, with unabashed candor and surprising detachment, a 1970s childhood unlike my own. Perhaps this unfamiliarity is what intrigued me about the premise. At first, I found myself alternately grasping for details to orient myself and pondering the narrator’s reliability. References to punk rock and cultural symbols offered occasional anchors in an otherwise dizzying sea of adventures. Readers are taken from Portland, Oregon to London, to Amsterdam, and dozens of other distant locales in little more than a hundred pages. Once I adjusted to the rhythm of the story and set aside a measure of skepticism, though, I settled in for a hair-raising tale.

Lafayette and her cohorts spent much of their adolescence either on the streets or searching for food, shelter, and drugs, often trading sexual favors to attain them. The author’s family is present but mostly peripheral to her upbringing. Many experiences are described with little emotional attachment, which left me wondering if her outrageous exploits were a search for a sense of self-worth.

Possums Run Amok is an intimate account of the frenetic life of a wild, wandering young woman, whose brash encounters with sex, drugs, and criminal activity—even communism—give the sense that she couldn’t live life fast enough. And perhaps she couldn’t. Upon returning from her last trip to Europe, she says, “I thought at the time there would be plenty of time to enjoy further adventure. What I didn’t know was that my Life would shortly end.”

At the brink of adulthood, Lafayette’s world is filled for a time with dazzling color and light, before crumbling under the weight of voices not her own. “From that moment, a veil was drawn; everything was gray and threatening. I passed through a period of complete non-feeling.” Soon after, she is diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized. The author’s descent into psychosis marks a sudden shift in circumstance and the language used to describe it. The narrative slows, as readers are invited to share the author’s misery in the confines of a mental institution, which appear to her interminable. The psychotropic drugs meant to calm her, unlike the drugs she willingly took in her youth, produce debilitating side effects. The contrasts are heartbreaking, but surprisingly apt.

The book is a quick read, partly due to the pace of the storytelling, but also because it’s relatively short. That itself may be indicative of Lafayette’s perception of the span of life she deemed worth living. This “true tale told slant” leaves readers breathless with anxiety at the author’s description of her reckless adolescence, yet filled with compassion for her eventual fate.