Let Me Count the Ways: A Memoir - Paperback

by Tomás Q. Morín (Author)

Winner of the 2023 Vulgar Genius Book Award
Winner of the 2022 Writer's League of Texas Book Award

Growing up in a small town in South Texas in the eighties and nineties, poverty, machismo, and drug addiction were everywhere for Tomás Q. Morín. He was around four or five years old when he first remembers his father cooking heroin, and he recalls many times he and his mother accompanied his father while he was on the hunt for more, Morín in the back seat keeping an eye out for unmarked cop cars, just as his father taught him. It was on one of these drives that, for the first time, he blinked in a way that evolution hadn't intended.

Let Me Count the Ways is the memoir of a journey into obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mechanism to survive a childhood filled with pain, violence, and unpredictability. Morín's compulsions were a way to hold onto his love for his family in uncertain times until OCD became a prison he struggled for decades to escape. Tender, unflinching, and even funny, this vivid portrait of South Texas life challenges our ideas about fatherhood, drug abuse, and mental illness.

Author Biography

Tomás Q. Morín is on the faculty at Rice University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of the poetry collections Machete, Patient Zero, and A Larger Country. He is the coeditor with Mari L'Esperance of the anthology Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, Slate, Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Narrative. He is a National Endowment of the Arts fellow.