MORPHINE DREAMS A decade ago, Charlie Brewster was on the Hollywood "A" list. Three best sellers, two hit movies, and one bomb later he lives in an apartment in Santa Barbara. As he once critically said, "It was hard to write with a coke spoon in one hand and a bottle in the other." Charlie now knows more waitresses at Denny's than maitre d's in Beverly Hills and he is okay with that. In the ensuing years he came to terms with fame's fleeting moments and lives his life with quiet equanimity. However, a bout of cancer has him worried about the brevity of life. It is time to reassess what went right and what went wrong. Why did he never make a relationship endure? Maybe his therapist was right? More importantly why can't he finish his romance novel? Morphine Dreams is a richly told tale. Using piquant wit and nostalgia for friends and places gone by, Charlie regales the reader with delightful anecdotes of his life as he reflects on the events of the past year. Beginning in October, as a wildfire burns in the Montecito hills, Charlie wonders how he came to be in a hospital bed at 58. It took him forty years to find his literary voice and only five years to lose it. Searching for answers, Charlie goes back to the previous New Years when Julie and he were still an item. Through the next twelve months, fraught with holidays, Charlie lives life while he remembers people and events from the past. While in the hospital he finds some new friends and makes surprising discoveries about himself and the things he loves and people he loved. At the same time, he finally talks about Lisa. The girl he refused to mention for forty years but who lived never far from his thoughts. Morphine Dreams is a fictional memoir. The story-line drifts back and forth in time. Charlie Brewster is an engaging and likable writer who is also burden with faults, the most notable being his inability to maintain a relationship. He also struggles with the memory of thwarted love.