A young writer at the end of a string of dead-end jobs travels to Costa Rica to reconnect with an old friend; he's planning on living cheaply for a winter while finishing the book he thinks will make his career. (And, of course, drinking every night and getting stoned every day. And maybe stealing the occasional pill.) But once there, he gets swept up in his friend's self-destruction, and runs out of money far sooner than expected...and there's no one back home he can call for help.
What follows is an epic odyssey across Central America and Mexico, hitchhiking with random strangers and sleeping anywhere he can as his mental health deteriorates and he tries to finish his book. Along the way, he meets joyful street buskers, narcissistic thieves, a Bible-thumper with multiple personalities, ex-convicts in a Narcotics Anonymous shelter-but, more importantly, himself.
Delirium Vitae is a new classic, an On the Road for the twenty-first century. Alternately charming and harrowing, it looks beneath the romance of adventure in a foreign land to see what it's really like to teeter between freedom and homelessness. (Because, let's be honest, walking thirty-six kilometers on an empty stomach, or fending off the amorous advances of a sweaty and shirtless truck driver who's giving you a much-needed ride, does kind of suck.) It's a fantastic book that looks not only at the excitement of the open road, but at why we go there, and what we leave behind-and whether we can ever still come home.
Industry Reviews
"LeBrun writes with the peculiar velocity of Denis Johnson. This is a book rich with wild language and a big-hearted journey into human confusion."
- Joshua Mohr, author of Model Citizen
"…a wayward, knife-edge adventure told in expressive detail... evocative of a real-life Alice in Wonderland."
— Frankie Martinez, Independent Book Review
"Delirium Vitae is a gritty, hallucinatory memoir… LeBrun's prose is raw, lyrical, and unvarnished…But there's also a quieter, more haunting theme of belonging and alienation. This is the quality I loved most."
— Hannah Sward, author of Strip
"LeBrun is a fresh and appealing new voice. Delirium Vitae reads like a novel."
— Diane Young, author of See No Evil
"The book moves through moments that hit like waves...Messy and alive in a way most books don't get to be."
— Maudlin House
"‘What’s hard about holding on to a job? Try holding on to a dream,’ writes David LeBrun in Delirium Vitae. LeBrun held on to his dream—setting off on the adventure that would transform and define him—and now he’s got a gritty, rollicking, and heart-breaking memoir to show for it. I put it on the shelf with Bukowski, Fante, and Kerouac."
— John Julius Reel, author of My Half Orange
