Tweaked: A Crystal Meth Memoir

About this book

Elegantly constructed searingly honest and impossible to put down. Andrew Solomon author of The Noonday Demon winner of the National Book Award There are moments when I suddenly realize that Im a nice boy from Iowa who is entirely comfortable sitting in a room of freaks. So begins Patrick Moores unforgettable account of life as a crystal meth addicta tweaker. Like a wild ride down Alices rabbit hole with a guide who is darkly funny and heartbreakingly honest Tweaked chronicles a twenty-year trip that stretches from Moores lonely childhood in Iowa with his grandmother Zelmaan alcoholic artist who when loaded turns frozen food into crafts projects to the day he sits naked in a Los Angeles rental hallucinating about psycho-robbers while talking to a possum hes sure is God. Along the way there are acid trips at the V.F.W. Dexetrim study halls with his Bad Girl Posse in the seventies teeth-grinding nights of dancing and anonymous sex in New York Citys hottest eighties clubs taking pictures of Andy Warhol losing friends and lovers and navigating a Byzantine underworld of cookers users club kids dealers and colorful characters as intense as the drug itself. There is Lee the glamorous outr bad boy with a devastating wit and a taste for danger; Tony the tweaker who likes to remove his eyebrows; Ding-Dong the Depends-wearing nearly blind housemate; Hisako the artist and squatter with an impenetrable Japanese accent and a fondness for hot plate cooking; Mother Judy the tough butch rehab counselor who takes no prisoners and countless others on the road from crystal meth hell to eventual sobriety. Candid gripping and ultimately triumphant Tweaked is that rarest of memoirsa tale so vivid and personal in the telling it feels like fiction but every word is true. DevastatingMoore writes fearlessly. --The Washington Post