Allen’s memoir, The Rooms of Heaven (320 pages. Knopf. $24), is a book about grieving and life after death. It’s extraordinary not only in its candor, but in the way it lures you in, forcing you to think about things that would strike you, in any other book, as pretty damn batty. When we meet Jim Beaman, he’s fixing chimneys and courting Mary like a real gentleman, all the while struggling with drugs. After Jim kills himself, Mary contacts him with a Ouija board, then begins obsessively channeling him with automatic writing: ““I remember standing inside [a friend’s] living room near the front door getting messages without a pen or paper, just writing in the air with my finger.’’ Mary doesn’t know if she’s healing or going crazy, but she winds up in ““the bin.’’ Allen’s book is at least 50 pages too long–it’s like an intimate phone call with a friend who can’t bring herself to hang up. Still, it will stay with you. As out-there as Allen seems, she never really did anything out of the ordinary: she fell in love, and she believed in heaven.
