The Rooms of Heaven

Allen's memoir is both confessional and therapeutic in tone. It begins in the summer of 1989, when she was employed as an editor in Iowa City and fell in love with Jim Beaman, a neighbor who worked in construction. Allen details the first blissful months of her relationship with Beaman and then charts how it all fell apart because of his inability to kick an intravenous cocaine habit. Despite Allen's efforts to deny the seriousness of Beaman's drug problem, his hospitalization after a binge, his abusive language and wild mood swings forced her to face the hopeless nature of his addiction, which ended with his suicide the following January. Allen describes her astonishing behavior during the months following Beaman's death, when, driven by an obsessive desire to contact her dead lover in the afterlife, she conducted experiments with a Ouija board. These led her to fill notebooks with automatic writing,characterized by meaningless squiggles that she believed were conversations with Beaman and other spirits. Eventually, Allen consented to a short, voluntary commitment to a psychiatric ward, where she was given lithium. She looks back on that period as necessary to her grieving and, although no longer beset by communications from the spirit world, does not discount the existence of an afterlife. Despite the subtitle, Allen doesn't go off the deep end in her treatment of an afterlife. Most of the book deals with her relationship with Beaman, which Allen renders in prose that's long on lyricism and descriptive virtuosity but short on psychological insight into either herself or her lover. 50,000 first printing. (Feb.)