Matt Rowland Hill's Reading List

"To be honest, if I could go back and give my younger self some books to pass the time in rehab, this wouldn’t be among them. Published in 1821, Confessions of an English Opium Eater tells the tale of De Quincey’s unhappy childhood, his years spent destitute in Wales and London, and his growing dependency on opium. It’s a strange, flawed book, but for anyone curious to understand how the addiction memoir form came to exist, it’s essential—because it’s unquestionably the prototype. Although in 1821 there were no other books of quite this kind, it’s interesting to note how many later conventions of the addiction memoir are already here in embryo. Present here are all the main ones I identified earlier, as well as several other tropes and common features of what we now call addiction memoirs. For instance, De Quincey invents—and defines—the form’s quintessential protagonist: “the hero of the piece or (if you choose) the criminal at the bar”. And he will not be the last writer whose warnings about drugs’ evil are somewhat offset by gorgeous descriptions of their effects elsewhere. Finally, De Quincey began a long and remarkably durable tradition among memoirists: upstaging their books’ hopeful conclusions with later drug use. “These troubles are past”, he declared of his addiction, “and thou wilt read these records… as the records of some hideous dream that can return no more.” In fact, although he lived another 37 industrious years after the Confessions were published—revising and expanding it several times, and writing two sequels among other works—one thing he never succeeded in doing was quitting opium. Although his case was extreme—he died at 74, still an addict—it was far from unusual. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Despite these striking similarities between the Confessions and later addiction memoirs, readers today are likely to be struck by one major difference in De Quincey: his concept of addiction, insofar as he had one. In a sense, this is hardly surprising: although there have always been addicts, it was long after the Confessions that addiction began to be conceptualised as a condition or illness, and only in recent decades has scientific research led to a satisfactory (if still incomplete) account of its aetiology. As a result, most educated readers now think of addicts as having a psychological condition whereby they compulsively numb emotional pain, often with origins in past trauma. From this perspective De Quincey’s tale makes perfect sense. Orphaned as a young child and raised by uncaring strangers, he was so miserable as a teenager that he fled his situation, considering homelessness an escape. In other words, he was primed for addiction long before he encountered his “celestial drug”. But he doesn’t make this connection, and his various explanations (or, as we might say, rationalisations) for his difficulties can seem bizarre: he seems to trace his adolescent unhappiness to being mistaught Classics at school—and, later, he blames his abuse of opium on stomach pain and tooth ache. Only occasionally does he show flashes of deeper insight: “What was it that did in reality make me an opium eater? Misery, blank desolation, abiding darkness.” In summary, the Confessions is an oddity, both uncannily familiar and bewilderingly alien. But at just 100 pages in its original edition—I would avoid De Quincey’s increasingly verbose revisions—it’s well worth reading for anyone interested in the development of the addiction memoir form. Or, indeed, memoir in general: although De Quincey didn’t invent autobiography in English, he greatly elevated our sense of its artistic potential. The baroque, rhapsodic passages on his opium-induced dreams show him as a master of English prose, and are worth the cover price alone."

"Dependency is startlingly unlike any other memoir about addiction—that I know of, at least. The first way in which Dependency differs from conventional addiction memoirs may seem simple, but it’s astonishingly effective: it doesn’t telegraph from the start that it’s a story about addiction. In an addiction memoir, there’s nothing less surprising than the protagonist developing an addiction. But in a person’s real life, addiction always arrives as a horrific shock, a jarring and outrageous disruption of narrative order. Dependency is the only book I’ve read that captures that experience. For two-and-a-half volumes the Copenhagen Trilogy seems to be the story of Ditlevsen’s unlikely escape from her suffocatingly poor and unhappy origins. A few poems published in a Danish newspaper while she is a teenager provide an entrée to the literary world, and in time she is one of the most celebrated writers in her country. Then, one day, after having an illegal abortion, a doctor gives her a dose of the heroin-like painkiller Demetrol—and her life changes irrevocably: ‘I decide never to let go of a man who can give me such an indescribable blissful feeling.’ She leaves her husband for the doctor, a virtual stranger, and invents an ear infection to finagle more and more of the drug out of him, eventually undergoing dangerous surgery on a perfectly healthy ear to maintain the fiction. When I first came across this book, having barely survived my own experience with drugs, I doubted anything I read on the subject could shock me. But nothing could have prepared me for this astonishing story and the way it conjures the insanity of the addict: a person in utter misery who will do virtually anything, however ruinous or degrading, to exacerbate it. And taking care to leave the reader unprepared is one way in which Ditlevsen’s writing succeeds in being so gripping and moving. The other main thing that sets Ditlevsen apart from most authors of addiction memoir is in her use of narrative point of view. Such books typically have a kind of dual narrator: sometimes caught up in events perceived through the author’s shortsighted younger eyes; at other times dispensing commentary or insight from the loftier perspective of—we presume—the author’s current self. “In real life, addiction always arrives as a horrific shock, a jarring and outrageous disruption of narrative order” Ditlevsen’s trilogy, by contrast, plunges us into the perspective of a succession of her former selves. When she’s a child, we’re presented with the world as a child might see it. When she’s hooked on Demetrol, we perceive events through the distorted viewpoint of an addict. This is the kind of myopic or unreliable narrator we encounter frequently in novels – conspicuously naïve or self-delusive, and unchaperoned by a consolingly wise authorial presence—but almost never in memoir. Told in the present tense (another rarity in autobiography), the result is a stunningly immersive and intimate story. We seem to experience Ditlevsen’s life with her, moment by vivid moment. I revere this book, but there is one false note in it: the final page or so, where Ditlevsen rather abruptly tries to persuade us she’s found salvation in love—and therefore that, in De Quincey’s words, “these troubles are past”. For the first time in the trilogy, we see the author seduced by her narrator’s fantasy. The convention that addiction memoirs should conclude on a definite note of redemption often produces endings that are psychologically or aesthetically trite—and, relatedly, that are belied by the subsequent facts of the author’s life. In both respects, this is particularly true here: five years after Dependency was published, Ditlevsen died by suicide. Ditlevsen’s failure of nerve, causing her to wrap up three volumes of the most trenchant and unillusioned autobiography ever written with a feeble daydream, is easily explained. She surely felt the reader (and perhaps the author) had endured too much pain in the preceding story to be sent away without solace. The fact that, in so doing, she effectively obeyed a formal convention of addiction memoir helps explain how many of those conventions arose. It was not due to some kind of lineage of influence reaching back to De Quincey, but the inevitable result of applying the simplifying dictates of storytelling and lowest-common-denominator audience needs to roughly similar experiences. The fact that even a great artist like Ditlevsen can capitulate to such dictates, if only once, demonstrates how powerful they are. But Ditlevsen’s single conventional moment also, I think, underlines her originality. The reason Dependency doesn’t look anything like an ordinary addiction memoir isn’t primarily that the form and its conventions didn’t exist when she wrote it; it’s that Ditlevsen understood exactly how readers would expect her to tell her story, and she that staying true to it would mean finding another way. The result was a tale whose bracing darkness is ultimately redeemed not by its perfunctorily hopeful ending but by the extraordinary force and beauty of its telling."

"Although I’m a fan of this book, if I’d based my selection purely on literary merit, in all honesty I’d have chosen instead Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight or Amy Liptrot ’s The Outrun , both of which are more verbally and formally original. But I think Knapp deserves a place in any overall consideration of addiction memoir as a form, for a number of reasons. It’s not only a landmark in the history of addiction memoir, but pretty much its Platonic ideal. Before her book was published in 1997, the memoir boom had produced a number of accounts of addiction with strikingly similar features. You could argue that Drinking: A Love Story played a key role in turning those accidental similarities into formal conventions by drawing them together, executing them flawlessly and, as a major bestseller, making them familiar to many readers. If you wanted to play the slightly arbitrary game of identifying the moment the addiction memoir came into being as a form, I think you could plausibly claim that it was with this book. And there’s another reason why, in a sense, Knapp’s book can be seen as a “better” addiction memoir than other, more artistically original, ones. As I’ve said, addiction memoirs serve a utilitarian purpose for many readers, who come to them for encouragement or instruction. A writer like Tove Ditlevsen would undoubtedly have considered the idea of providing therapy for the reader pure sacrilege, an abandonment of art’s unqualified commitment to the truth—and you’d never give Dependency to someone in their early days of rehab, desperate for hope. Meanwhile Knapp’s book—as well as being very good—could benefit anyone attempting to make sense of their relationship with substances. And without being dogmatic, she’s not above dispensing hopeful little maxims: Early recovery has the quality of vigorous exercise, as though each repetition of a painful moment… serves to build up emotional muscle. The book tells the story of how Knapp—a successful magazine journalist and author—hid her alcoholism, and its devastating consequences, for many years. “I fell in love,” she says, “and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.” It’s as intelligent and articulate about the insidious nature of addiction as it is, later, about the trials and joys of recovery. Knapp relates her story in a prose that’s a model of lucidity and understated style. In a way, the book isn’t unlike how she describes her life as a high-functioning alcoholic: “Smooth and ordered” on the outside; “roiling and chaotic” underneath. There are no literary fireworks here: just a finely crafted story told by someone whose insight is all the more worth hearing for the high price she had to pay for it. In short, I do agree. I know it’s true from introspection, and from spending time around other addicts, whether using or in recovery. And, compared with the people of Thomas De Quincey’s era, we know quite a lot about the aetiology of addiction: we can read books on the psychology of addiction like Gabor Mate’s superb In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (2010), which elucidates the now conclusive scientific evidence for its connection with childhood trauma. But before science caught up, literature had shown a profound understanding of the psychology of addiction. Acute portrayals of the condition appear in Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler , Jean Rhys’s novels and Raymond Carver’s stories, to name just a few. But it’s depictions of the full life cycle of addiction–often in serial works like Ditlevsen’s, Mary Karr’s and Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose books –that most clearly reveal the truth: that it’s not a moral defect or a random miswiring of the brain, but an individual’s compulsive attempt to blot out suffering carried over from the past. If calling addiction a ‘spiritual’ problem is supposed to prescribe submission to a supernatural ‘higher power’ as a formula for recovery, it’s not for me – though I know the 12-step philosophy works for many people. But, more broadly defined, don’t mind the word ‘spiritual’: my own story, where heroin addiction follows close on the heels of a teenage loss of faith, seems to illustrate how addiction can be a kind of spiritual search, a seeking after meaning or transcendence. And it’s interesting that the Latin root of the word ‘addict’ is related to the word ‘devotion.’"

"Whereas my progress was from religion to addiction, Mary Karr’s was the other way around. She’s a practising Catholic and I’m an atheist. But though our world-views are in some ways profoundly different, few books have enriched me as a reader and a person more than hers. She’s one of the living masters of the memoir form. 1995’s The Liars’ Club , which describes her extraordinary and troubled family—her mother would sometimes joke about the time she left bullet holes in the kitchen wall by trying to shoot her daughters—is a stone-cold classic of autobiographical writing. Karr arrived with a unique literary voice that combined rich Texan and burst of lyricism. And she had an almost miraculous ability to portray her broken family with wit and love, without ever flinching from pain. 2000’s Cherry picked up the story by showing Karr as an adolescent, already dabbling with drugs and profoundly lacking any sense of belonging. 2009’s Lit is the volume that deals with Karr’s alcoholism and desperate search for recovery. It can be read alone, but why would you want to miss out on reading all three in order? Although the first two volumes aren’t overtly about Karr’s addiction, they show its makings in her traumatic home life and a lost adolescence. “People whose lives are in crisis are rarely the most sophisticated readers” Lit opens with Karr on the cusp of adulthood. Although she makes faltering progress in building a simulacrum of grown-up life, her relationship with alcohol—“I had an appetite for drink, a taste for it, a talent”—steadily overtakes everything. By the end of her drinking she is reduced to crouching on a stairwell outside her apartment, glugging whisky with her one-year-old son and failing marriage inside. But even more than how it captures the bleakness of alcoholism, what I most value in this book is how she narrates her recovery with such brutal honesty. This is no joyful, linear skip towards sobriety and redemption. Karr gets sober and relapses, again and again. She spends time on a psych ward. She keeps showing up to 12-step meetings, even when they do nothing for her. Her breakthrough arrives as much through exhaustion as some kind of epiphany. She discovers in Catholicism a spirituality that makes sense to her and seems to keep her sober, but she doesn’t proselytise or become too holy for irony. Instead she presents herself as a kind of Godly schmuck, chronically slow on the spiritual uptake. For readers who’ve followed her over three searingly honest books, where survival let alone redemption often seemed unlikely, her final discovery of a bruised and hard-won peace feels like an instance of what can only be called grace."

"It’s not easy to evoke on the page what is, to most people, the profoundly alien experience of a hard drugs binge. But where others fall short, Bill Clegg’s Portrait of an Addict as Young Man succeeds brilliantly, capturing the minute-by-minute horror of a near-lethal chemical spiral. A slim book whose main action covers just a few weeks, the short crack and vodka binge it describes is enough to destroy Clegg’s life, and very nearly end it. It makes for bracing reading, and spares us no detail at all: we’re immersed in the protagonist’s mind as he stalks from hotel to hotel, the money in his bank account rapidly draining away, his life becoming increasingly unreal and death beginning to seem attractive, if not inescapable. We see him on his knees when the drugs runs out and the dealers’ phones are off, desperately scrambling for one more shard of crack. We see him getting an extra hole punched in his belt as he rapidly loses weight, and then another a few days later. We watch him lie to, and hide from, his loved ones as, helpless, they are reduced to blind panic at his predicament. Clegg’s manic spiral is related in a relentless present tense, in a prose that’s sparse and detached—and lit up by little flares of lyricism to conjure each hit. Horrified and enthralled, we see the world through Clegg’s increasingly despairing gaze—and a part of us longs as much as he does for another fix to provide some relief from the horror. Portrait is often collected with its sequel, Ninety Days , which portrays the period after Clegg’s release release from the rehab that saved him (and ends by explaining how life complicated the book’s redemptive ending – as with De Quincey and Ditlevsen). Although both are worth reading, it’s the first I find myself returning to, marvelling at its ability to conjure the insanity of addiction from inside its diabolical reality. Well, of course I tried my best to steal from them whatever I could. I very consciously looked to Karr for inspiration in how to write candidly yet lovingly about an imperfect family. I learned a lot from Clegg—or I hope I did—about how to convey the terrifying experience of a runaway binge. I tried to be as brutally unsparing of my faults as both those writers. I’d like to think Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight influenced me, too, particularly by encouraging me to try and be harrowing and funny at once. But naturally I wanted to write something original, so I hope my reading—as much as helping me imitate the virtues of good addiction memoirs—showed me how to avoid the form’s worst foibles. Instead of telling the story from the viewpoint of an enlightened paragon of recovery—which would have made it fiction, anyway—I decided to do something I hadn’t seen in addiction memoir: fashion an unreliable, often ignorant, sometimes even deranged narrator, who seems to have no idea how much he’s betraying his hypocrisies and self-deceptions. (Towards the end of the project, I read Ditlevsen and—although slightly disappointed to discover I hadn’t been as innovative as I thought—the success of her experiment encouraged me to think I was on the right track.) Then there’s my book’s ending and its ambivalent relationship with redemption—which I won’t say any more about, in case anyone’s interested enough to read it and find out what I mean, but which I think makes it a little different from other addiction memoirs. Although I don’t mind if the book’s called an addiction memoir, in the course of writing it I came to think that wasn’t quite right. I drew as much on another tradition: memoirs about loss of faith, like Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son and Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? And, in fact, drugs are absent from most of the book’s action, which is about my sometimes difficult childhood as the son of an evangelical preacher, growing up (or failing to), the catastrophe of losing my faith in my teens—and then my desperate search for salvation elsewhere. Drugs were just the most destructive of the several wrong places I looked; others were literature and women, or the fantasies I projected onto them. Ultimately I think my book’s about our relationship with the past that shaped us: how hard it is to move on, and how hard to return. And in that sense my story’s the usual one: we all grow up in what you could think of as more or less benign cults, indoctrinated in the worldview of the people who raise us. Then we leave, and we all have to try and learn how to see with our own eyes, and to decide what to try and keep and what to try and leave behind. If I have any faith now, it’s in literature’s ability to help us redeem even life’s darkest realities by bringing them into the light. I don’t like books that offer false optimism or glib solutions; give me authentic stories in which, as Blake says, “joy and woe are woven fine.” So my frequent experience while rereading these five wonderful books—as well as others by Stahl, Jamison and Liptrot—before this conversation was gratitude for their authors’ courage, honesty and skill. Having said that, I did—while reading Ditlevsen’s Dependency —occasionally need to put the book down and take a few deep breaths. Even the second time around I found it so viscerally powerful that at times I was overwhelmed. It was every bit as gruelling and heartbreaking as the truth required it to be. And I can’t think of a better compliment to a writer of addiction memoir – or, indeed, any writer – than that."