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 by Joe Clifford 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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