Georgia eats her blanket. Aiden gets drunk on Red Eye and falls in a bathtub of wallpaper paste. Alice loves a one-legged Mexican cowboy.
Parallel to Paradise, Addiction and Other Love Stories makes the ordinary askew. The storylines tend to be hard, perhaps controversial: The mother of a heroin addict; a young Catholic girl contemplating an abortion; a gay boy growing up in the Wild Wild West; butter sculpture. But even a crumbling building has beauty. Even an addict has beauty. Here's a few samples lines:

I married George, not in the Catholic Church, but in the Muir redwoods. It was very early in the morning and I wore a veil of fog held in place with a single gardenia.

The pretty angel on my hospital bed begins to fade and gold angel dust falls all around me and I kind of want to snort it. But I fall back to sleep without saying goodbye.

He didn't look like a heroin addict but he was as skinny as the word lily.

I don't know that Virginia City was the best place for a drunk. For the love of God, we owned our own bar and if Mum kicked him out, Dad had only to walk two doors down either direction and another stool trilled round, all shiny red vinyl, like it was calling his name. "Auld Aiden, come sit on my face!"