Genre:
Biography
Description:
Junkie
Love portrays the author’s
existence as a drug addict.
Author:
Joe
Clifford is acquisitions editor for Gutter Books and managing editor
of The Flash Fiction Offensive.
He is the author of three books.
You can
learn more about the author at his website.
Appraisal:
This is one
hell of a book. It reminds me of another I reviewed, Just
Like That by Les Edgerton. The
subject matter is entirely different, the parallel lies in the
incredible honesty that both authors apply in their work. In Junkie
Love the author charts his
decline from light drug user to utterly messed up waste of space and
then recovery. I truly struggle to understand how Clifford actually
survived.
The writing
style is interesting and unusual, a mix of past tense flashback
chapters in the past tense interspersed with others in present tense.
It’s unfair to say the narrative is confusing, the thread does move
about, but it conveys the mental state of a junkie. We’re not
talking lucid here, memories are jumbled for the straightest of
people, never mind those who spend most of their times either high or
hunting down their next fix.
The author
is incredibly blunt about the life he led, the places (dumps really)
he lived (like Hepatitis Heights) and the things he did to survive. I
doubt 99% of the population would never experience anything like the
events in Junkie Love.
Here’s an example:
I didn’t
last long. Like every other job I’ve ever had, I was fired from
this one, too. As the summer nights grew shorter, my heroin problem
grew worse, and a quarter gram of speed just wasn’t enough to drag
me from the other side of town fast enough, especially if I was
chasing down smack. Heroin first, speed second, cocaine third and
then the other stuff like food and shelter. That was my hierarchy of
needs.
Then there
are the supporting characters. Minor ones with nicknames (e.g.
Gluehead) come and go but there are a handful of constants – the
author’s wife, Catherine, who has serious mental health issues and
is dealt with in the past tense chapters, Amy a junkie girlfriend in
the present tense and his family who are in both. Ultimately almost
all these relationships fade, only the author’s family is there at
the end (remarkable given what he put them through).
Here’s an
example of the writing, and one of the characters:
Oksana
was boiling cat heads in a big pot on the stove when I got back to
the apartment. Oksana collected road kill, cooking off the fur and
using the bleached bits of skull as jewelry. A homeless, teenaged
speed dealer, she’d race the midnight streets of San Francisco on
her skateboard, a demon pixie draped in shiny beads and necklaces
delivering product, two giant guard dogs snapping at her side like
the Hounds of Hell.
Brilliant,
but shocking stuff.
FYI:
Swearing.
Copious references to drug use.
Added
for Reprise Review: Junkie
Love was a nominee in the
Non-Fiction category for B&P 2014 Readers' Choice Awards.
Original review ran January 31, 2014
Format/Typo
Issues:
None.
Rating:
***** Five Stars
Reviewed
by: Keith Nixon
Approximate
word count: 60-65,000 words
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