Blue Days, Black Nights: A Memoir

"A brilliant and inspirational vision of love, death and spiritual redemption in 20th Century America. Ron Nyswaner's account of his struggle with real life demons great and small is gripping, harrowing and sometimes shockingly intimate. It is heartbreaking and yes-it is also very, very funny indeed. It delivers an emotional intensity that fiction, by comparison, can only hope to achieve."-Jonathan Demme

"Ron Nyswaner's courageous and exquisitely written memoir speaks to us all on the mysteries of whom we love and why. The book reminds me most of Somerset Maugham's classic, Of Human Bondage-for true passion has an involuntary nature, so well depicted here. Ron Nyswaner is a poet of the secret self, and his first book marks a stellar debut."-Laura Shaine Cunningham, author of Sleeping Arrangements, Beautiful Bodies, A Place In the Country, and Dreams of Rescue

A wrong turn down a one-way street in the shadow of the Sunset Strip's Chateau Marmont leads Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia, Soldier's Girl) on a journey that will nearly drown him in the intoxicating, impulsive, maddening, tragic, and transformative nature of love. Despite the success of his latest film, Ron has been fighting depression and contemplating self-destruction. "I don't want a mediocre, empty life," he tells his psychiatrist-acupuncturist-herbalist after halfheartedly attempting to hang himself with a belt. Then, on a trip from his home in upstate New York to Los Angeles, Ron meets and falls for world-weary Johann, a Latin-quoting, leather-clad hustler with a vague, European accent. In the next year Johann will teach him many things: how to make a crack pipe out of a soda can, how to come down from a crystal meth binge, how to walk down a city street as if he owns it, how to beg for "more" in Hungarian, and how to lose oneself utterly in reckless passion. If he can survive it, loving Johann might be Ron's salvation.

Ron Nyswaner wrote the screenplays for Mrs. Soffel, Swing Shift, Philadelphia, (for which he received an Academy Award nomination,) and Soldier's Girl. He lives in Woodstock, N.Y.