Books By Addicts: A Collection

The Up and the Down.
 
(Click titles for full review)

Steve Earle and the Ghost of Hank Williams: I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive

Musician Steve Earle made a solo name for himself with "Guitar Town" and "Copperhead Road" after playing in legendary country and bluegrass bands as a young prodigy. He was nominated for a Grammy, his reputations soared, he added rock and roll to his range—until 1991, when Earle put out the aptly named live album, Shut Up and Die Like An Aviator. Shortly thereafter, he was dropped by his record label for long-standing drug problems, and landed in prison with a heavy sentence for possession of heroin….






When Did I Become the Junkie Auntie Mame? Courtney Love tells her tangled tale in a new e-book.

Maer Roshan, author of Courtney Comes Clean: The High Life and Dark Depths of Music’s Most Controversial Icon, logged a dozen “exhilarating and exhausting” sessions with the widow of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain over the course of a year, pulling together a definitive look at Love’s drug addictions and other demons. Roshan taped countless hours of interviews, and received additional written material from the “Tolstoy of texting,” as Love refers to herself. The book is highly readable, almost, one is tempted to say, addictively so. Sure, it’s tabloid stuff—let he or she who has never peeked at Gawker or Jezebel cast the first stone….





Mike Doughty Talks About The Book of Drugs: Former Soul Coughing front man on sobriety and life as a solo artist.

Over the phone, Mike Doughty doesn’t have much to say about his former band, Soul Coughing. When I mention it, he gives out a low growl as a warning. He said it all in The Book of Drugs, and it doesn’t sound like he had much fun. Although the avant-garde rock band created music that was spiky and sneaky and immensely popular, topped off by Doughty’s monotonic but strangely penetrating vocal delivery on such classics as “Super Bon Bon,” “True Dreams of Wichita,” and “Circles,” Doughty was drug-dependent and miserable….






Writers On The Edge: A compendium of tough prose and poetry about addiction

Here’s a book I’m delighted to promote unabashedly. I even wrote a jacket blurb for it. I called it an “honest, unflinching book about addiction from a tough group of talented writers. These hard-hitters know whereof they speak, and the language in which they speak can be shocking to the uninitiated—naked prose and poetry about potentially fatal cravings the flesh is heir to—drugs, booze, cutting, overeating, depression, suicide. Not everybody makes it through. Writers On The Edge is about dependency, and the toll it takes, on the guilty and the innocent alike.”






Book Review of Drunken Angel: A hipster gets his shit straight—sort of.

Addiction memoirs remain one of the most popular forms of autobiography on the shelves. But now, when considering a new addition to the genre, it’s impossible not to wonder whether the claims being made by the author are genuine. Since serious drunks often end up visiting the lower circles of hell during the course of their disease, hair-raising and improbable scenes are lamentably common—that is part of the genre’s charm, if that is the right word for it. But how are we to react now? The answer is, you can’t know, and you never really could, that bastard James Frey notwithstanding....






Addiction Fiction: Coming-of-Age Drug Novels

Call it “addiction fiction.” In the past few years we have seen a blossoming of this genre, where the private eye goes to 12-Step meetings, and one day your sponsor may just save your life by gunning down a rival in the street. Or, where the wise-beyond-their-years prep school drug addicts engage in Brett Easton Ellis-style sex and ennui….








Addiction Noir: The Next Right Thing

To date, I’ve only reviewed one novel here at Addiction Inbox—Steve Earle’s I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, featuring the ghost of Hank Williams standing in for the addictive pleasures that musicians are heir to. Now comes The Next Right Thing by Dan Barden, an exemplar of a new literary genre I am going to call addiction noir….








John Berryman and the Poetry of “Irresistible Descent”: The penal colony’s prime scribe

A year before he committed suicide by jumping off a Minneapolis bridge in 1972, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Berryman had been in alcohol rehab three times, and had published a rambling, curious, unfinished book about his treatment experiences. Recovery is a time capsule. If you think we have little to offer addicts by way of treatment these days, consider the picture in the 60s and 70s. In Recovery, treatment consists almost entirely of Freudian group analysis, and while there is regular talk of alcoholism as a disease, AA style, there is no evidence that it was actually dealt with in this way, after detoxification....

Steve Earle and the Ghost of Hank Williams

Book Review: I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive

Musician Steve Earle made a solo name for himself with Guitar Town and Copperhead Road after playing in legendary country and bluegrass bands as a young prodigy. He was nominated for a Grammy, his reputations soared, he added rock and roll to his range—until 1991, when Earle put out the aptly named live album, Shut Up and Die Like An Aviator. Shortly thereafter, he was dropped by his record label for long-standing drug problems, and landed in prison with a heavy sentence for possession of heroin. He completed rehab successfully, earned his parole in 1994, and has gone on since then to make several highly successful albums, guest star in the TV series The Wire, and write music for the New Orleans-based series Treme.

And now he has written a novel called I’ll Never Get out of This World Alive, set mostly in San Antonio, with a main character who is an aging doctor and a heroin addict. Doc’s specialty is quick but relatively safe and sterile backroom abortions, commonly performed on illegal immigrants. His license to practice long ago taken away, Doc takes in enough to make his daily pilgrimage to the parking lot where his longtime dealer works the streets. The book’s title is taken from the name of a Hank Williams song, which is appropriate, because whether or not you enjoy this novel may depend upon your reaction to Hank’s ghost hanging around the main character, begging for a drink and some attention. Things get even stranger when a young Mexican girl, Graciela, falls under the doctor’s care, and begins to exhibit signs of stigmata and the power to heal drug addicts. Rather than choosing to tell his tale straightforwardly, Earle is working more in the tradition of Latin American magical realism. This is no One Hundred Years of Solitude, but a lot hangs on belief, and the power of unseen forces to organize events in unforeseen ways.

Earle has a fun, quick touch with character description and the telling anecdote, explaining, for example, that local narcotic detective Hugo Ackerman “rarely hurried even when attempting to catch a fleeing offender. He had worked narcotics for over a decade, and in his experience neither the junkies nor the pushers were going far. He caught up with everybody eventually.”

Set in 1963, the book carries us through the Kennedy assassination and other cultural events as background. And we get a nice, deft description of what starts the doctor down the road toward smackdom: “Then in the first year of his residency he befriended a crazy old pathologist who worked the midnight shift in the county morgue, and it was he who introduced Doc to the miracle of morphine. From that very first shot it was as if he’d discovered the one vital ingredient that God had left out when He’d send Doc kicking and screaming into the cold, cruel world.”

I won’t say that Mr. Earle should give up his day job on the basis of this outing, but I do think that critics who have dismissed his efforts have overlooked some of what the author is attempting to say about addiction, and about recovery--that recovery involves all kinds of intangibles like faith, hope and charity, and that these attributes can present themselves in myriad disguises. (And a lot of critics got it: Michael Ondaatje wrote that this “subtle and dramatic book is the work of a brilliant songwriter who has moved from song to orchestral ballad with astonishing ease.”)

I think this book is, in fact, written very much with addicts in mind. The shade of Hank Williams doesn’t dog Doc everywhere just because Steve Earle is a huge fan. Hank Williams was also a vicious, go-to-hell alcoholic and drug addict who could not make the turnaround Steve Earle has made, and therefore could not even get out of his twenties alive, let alone this world.  Earle has Doc stand in for him when it comes to lessons learned: “Doc was immediately sucked in by the big lie that all junkies want to believe in spite of daily evidence to the contrary, that this shot was going to be like that first shot all those years ago. He tied off, found the money vein in the back of his arm, well rested now because he had always reserved that one for the big shots, the teeth rattlers, and it stood at attention like a soldier on payday.”

I won’t give out any spoilers here, as the miraculous Graciela bleeds from her wounds and lays hands on dying addicts to save them. It’s the stuff of, well fiction—but fiction informed by the author’s firsthand voyage into heroin bondage. Steve Earle is living proof of the overarching theme of his book: redemption in its many guises.

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