Memoirs

As you know, I love a good memoir about addiction. I've just recently finished three and they were quite enjoyable. My favorite was "Confessions of a Carb Queen" by Susan Blech. I usually read books about drug and alcohol addiction, so food addiction is a bit different. I mean, you need food to live, but you don't need meth to live. So it's hard to imagine the need to eat an entire Pizza Hut pizza, a fish sandwich from McD's AND Burger King and then a family pack of chicken wings from the grocery store. I'm sure I would throw up about halfway through. But the author of this book ate things like that in huge volumes on a regular basis. She balooned up to 400 plus pounds and had to go to a treatment facility to lose the weight. It was such a compelling story that I finished it in just a couple days. I read it in the car at lunch, after work (instead of watching repeats of "Top Chef" on Bravo) and at breakfast instead of leafing through last week's Stranger. Hearing about Susan's trials with food made me look at fat people a little bit differently.

Recently, I also read a couple meth memoirs. One was "Leaving Dirty Jersey" by James Salant and the other was "Tweaked" by Patrick Moore. Reading about meth addiction is so fascinating to me because of how highly addictive it is and because of the wide variety of people that use it. The author of "Leaving Dirty Jersey" was a rich kid from Jersey that ended up in California with criminals and dealers and actually shot meth into his naughty bits. (Just once, but it was cringewothy to be sure.) The author of "Tweaked" was a gay man that started doing meth when he went to clubs in New York in the 80s. His experience is different, but no less interesting.

All three of these books were very enjoyable and all the authors ended up clean at the end. (As with most memoirs that I've read.)

A good addiction memoir can be a riveting read, and can also make you (and by you, I mean me) feel better about the itchy rash that won't seem to vacate your chest region, because at least you're not spending $300 to $400 on fast food per week or staying awake for five days and stealing mascara from the drugstore to put in a care package for your friend from rehab that's now in prison. It's all about perspective.