Review by Natalie Browne – Fullhurst Community College
Wasted is an exceptional account of madness, addiction, agony, decadence, yet most pertinently, love. It had me in the throes of hysteria and the depths of despair as I read it and it invoked the ability for me to both laugh with unfettered joy and cry with uncontrollable sorrow. The impact that this novel had on me was breathtakingly astounding.
Goffin recounts the story of two sisters who share a profound and special bond. Abigail, the youngest by seven years, holds the free-spirited and reckless Jasmine in the highest esteem; Jasmine is her beautiful idol, a wayward ‘hippy’ who is stubbornly rooted in her bohemian principles. However, the uninhibited Jasmine is also manacled by a destructive and profligate addiction to heroin. Moreover, she is also afflicted with the blighting mental illness, schizophrenia, which renders her life – and the lives of those around her – to be torturous, arduous and, sometimes, virtually impossible. Abi is devoted to Jasmine, yet when she leaves for Brighton to go to university at eighteen, she realises that she is not so dissimilar to her rebellious sister. Abi slides rapaciously into a hedonistic lifestyle fuelled by drugs and alcohol and her daily inebriation proves to hold more appeal to her than her studies. It takes a huge and devastating wake-up call to haul Abi back to reality and to force her to re-evaluate her life. We come to see how these two sisters, manifested as so different, are actually strikingly alike: the self-destructive junkie and the hedonistic student, both seemingly caring for each other more than themselves.
This novel struck me hard like a sharpened blade to the brain. It is not only of a laudable quality of writing but is utterly commendable for the tricky issues it broaches. It is, however, not for the faint-hearted or easily offended as much of the content and language can only be described as rather, ahem, licentious. In spite of this Wasted oozes sprightly effervescence and the spirit of youth.
Goffin focuses on the battles with one’s own demons and juxtaposes this aptly with the heady days of self-nihilistic studentdom. This novel is also an enchanting love story of two sisters, fighting for themselves and for each other and trying – often vainly – to get through each day whilst maintaining a degree of sobriety (in Abi’s case) and sanity (in Jasmine’s). It is touching, poignant and acute to the details of the boundless scope of human emotions. Wasted overflows with intrepid humour, rapt with feeling and pathos, yet, most saliently, it is concerned with the in-severable nexus that inexorably holds these two girls together through thick and thin. The overriding notion and wise moral of this multifarious book is that love is unconquerable. This is an amazing and profound novel and arguably provides the best insight into such taboo subjects since Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation.
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