Review for Flew Too High by Louie Mandrapilias

The life of Louie Mandrapilias, whose name I would struggle to pronounce just as much as the many characters he meets, seems fictional the way it’s portrayed in Flew Too High. The spiral of love and sex and drugs is real enough. We all probably know someone who’s been caught in one (or even ourselves). Yet, it’s the distance that spiral takes the author on, and the people he meets along the way who feel larger than life.

Not many memoirs can create the same page-turning motivation as a thriller novel. Flew Too High did this in spades, especially when a green drug mule makes his first run. In what is perhaps the strongest praise, Mandrapilias won me over as a reader so well in the lead-up that I was rooting for the drugs to make it through customs somehow. Irreverently funny, just the right touch of self-deprecating, and outrageous enough to stay interesting, the author’s voice sucked me in and kept me invested. The title was also a perfect choice. An allusion to Icarus both there and in the graphic on the cover, it ties into Louie’s heritage and the complicated relationship he has with his father. On other levels, it applies to the ups and downs of a habitual drug user. And, how so many of them end on one last fly high.

I was very close to rating this memoir higher, but a few things held me back. If I’d been reading a physical copy, I’d have ruffled through some of the pages wondering if I was missing some at the end. At least there is a continuation planned, but personally prefer less truncated endings. There were also a handful of errors that broke immersion for me. This didn’t affect the rating, but the epub version given for review was unreadable. I hope the digital version on release doesn’t have the same overlapping text.

Perhaps not the inspirational story many memoir readers look for, I still highly recommend Flew Too High. The last thing you can say about the author’s life is that it was boring.

Flew Too High is available to buy on Amazon.