Josh Samman’s book ‘The Housekeeper’ does some heavy lifting

One of the tricky things about writing a memoir at just 28 years old is that people tend not to appreciate the merit of the enterprise. That is unless something tragic or otherwise extraordinary has happened at such a young age, and you’re a semi-public figure who’s had to deal with life’s screwball narratives in the open. Like the UFC’s Josh Samman.Samman’s life is forever intertwined with that of “Isabel,” his girlfriend who died in a car crash back in Aug. 2013 at 22 years old. He wrote a book, The Housekeeper: Love, Death & Prizefighting, which came out on April 20 and is largely dedicated to her. It’s not ghost written, like so many others in the racket. In fact, MMA is a sideline in its pages, a mooring for Samman to return to.Mostly it’s a moving account of his life, frontloaded with its transgressions into drugs and institutions and pomp, and his intersections with Isabel, the pseudonym he used for his girlfriend. Like many in prizefighting, the cage was a salvation for a wayward soul. There’s an identity in the balance. In Samman’s case, Isabel was a guiding light for him, and yet also a conflict. Between the two, Samman stretches out as a writer — something he proves more than adept to do, particularly as his story moves into complicated terrain. And the dark edges Samman skirts upon his girlfriend’s death are harrowing. At one point, when locked away in a hotel room, altering mental states between benzos and other pharmaceuticals, he mentions the pistol lying at his side each time he surfaced back into consciousness. “I was comforted by the availability of it,” he writes. Later, when he emerges momentarily in bog of grief and meds to go to her funeral, he lets out a haunting thought that anybody who has suffered loss is familiar with. “Isabel hadn’t packed me anything to wear to her own funeral,” he writes. In that one sentence he brings you close to the vertigo of his reality at that moment. It’s the hell you’d rather not attend, and the chilling clarity rings through — nobody wants the burden of writing such a book. Yet Samman felt it needed to come out.And he brings his most difficult moments to the page like no young person should have to. “That chapter was the one I imagine my mother having the hardest time reading, and my loved ones having the hardest time reading,” Samman says of the suicidal moments. “One of the parts that was hard to write, and hard to relive as I was writing it, was the shower scene, where right before she died she was crying in the shower trying to unplug her own hair from the drain, and then I get back to the house [after she died] the hair was still there.”To be effective in a …

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