Sex Death Enlightenment

A True Story

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First, I'd always been a little crazy, not clinically, just over intense, compulsive, prone to a variety of erotic addictions and narcissistic mood swings - euphoria to despair in three seconds flat. Second the backdrop of my breakdown - New York in the eighties - was insane itself. Third, and most important, I was plugged into the epicenter of that insanity, working for Andy Warhol, the grand vizier of meaninglessness, and the most famous artist in the world.
 

 


 

 

Mark Matousek takes you everywhere his title promises – and then some. Sex Death Enlightenment is the most gripping and elegantly written memoir I’ve read in ages. It tugged me onward like the best suspense novel, though I couldn’t help lingering time and again to savor its wisdom.

– Armistead Maupin Author of Tales of the City
 


An extraordinarily articulate chronicle of how the sickness of our time can spawn spiritual awakening and compassion.

– Ram Dass, Author of Be Here Now and Grist For the Mill
 


Brave, beautiful and brilliantly observed.

– Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

As Mark Matousek’s exhilarating memoir, Sex Death Enlightenment, proves, disgust with and even terror at the hollowness of a life spent manufacturing glitz and can send one screaming down the highway toward the holy even faster then doing time in an ashram….as his soulful book makes clear. That is only the first of many astonishing discoveries available to the openhearted, even those who work at (or read) slick magazines with celebrities on the cover.

– Esquire


Mark Matousek tasted the intensity of the surface, the glamour, the unrelenting rush: scratching the surface, he found more surfaces, in an endless, self-reflecting high that finally broke under its own weightlessness, and propelled him, often against his will, on a remarkable journey of spiritual self-discovery. This is the story of that extraordinary journey – from surface to depth, from exterior to interior, a spiritual odyssey that is truly of our time, genuine in its care, redeeming in its grace.

– Ken Wilbur, Author of A Brief History of Everything



Can a man who has been put through the wringer by life…actually write a memoir free of self-pity? Mark Matousek has done it. Even more remarkably, he has written a book about (spiritual) fulfillment without once sounding flaky….you’ll find it hard not to admire a man so determined to find a deeper meaning in a difficult life….Prose that sings….Matousek comes to a realization of life’s wonders in a scene that will leave no reader unmoved.

– People Magazine
 


A mesmerizing account….Utterly down to earth, even inspiring.

-Kirkus Reviews
 

“With the speed and brilliance of a meteor….it is bound to elicit comparisons with Robert Pirsig’s amazing 1974 memoir, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for its narrative of a man seeking his place in the world by attempting to synthesize Western culture and Eastern spirituality…..Almost compulsively readable.  His perseverance…and the truce wrested from his struggle – much like the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel – will inspire many readers.”

-Echo Magazine

 

“This is a candid and courageous account of one man’s search for spiritual meaning – an inspiring book, full of hope.”

-Andrew T. Weil. M.D. ,Author of Spontaneous Healing

 

“This strangely compelling book opens and opens into unexpected depths.  Sex Death Enlightenment is the story of a bold, skeptical, down-to-earth soul willing to be educated by the hardest things in the world, willing to look into the face of despair and death and come up from that black and bitter embrace changed, open-hearted, eager to live.”

-Mark Doty, Author of Heaven’s Gate