White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin

How do you describe an addiction in which the drug of choice creates a hole in your memory a white out so that every time you use it is the first time--new fascinating and vivid? Michael W. Clunes original edgy yet literary telling of his own story takes us straight inside such an addiction--what he calls the Memory Disease. With black humor and quick rhythmic prose Clunes gripping account of life inside the heroin underground reads like no other as we enter the mind of the addict and navigate the world therein. Clune whisks us between the streets of Baltimore and the university campus revealing his dual life while a graduate student teaching literature. We spiral downward with Clune--from nodding off in an abandoned row-house with a one-armed junkie and a murderous Jesus freak to scanning a crowded lecture hall for an enemy with a gun. After experiencing his descent into addiction we go with him through detox treatment and finally into recovery as he returns to his childhood home and to the world of color. It is there that the Memory Disease and his heroin-induced white out begins to fade.