White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin

Summary

The tenth-anniversary edition of Michael Clune's classic memoir of addiction and recovery: "Dreamily exact . . . sensual and hilarious . . . One of the year's best books" (The New Yorker).

With dark humor, and in crystalline prose, Clune's account of life inside the heroin underground is like no other. Whisking us between the halves of his precarious double life—between the streets of Baltimore and the college classroom, where Clune is a graduate student teaching literature—we spiral along with him as he approaches rock bottom: from nodding off in a row house with a one-armed junkie and a murderous religious freak to having his life threatened in a Chicago jail while facing a felony possession charge.

After his descent into addiction, we follow Clune through detox, treatment, and finally into recovery as he returns to his childhood home, where the memory disease and his heroin-induced white out begin to fade. White Out is more than a memoir. It is a rigorous investigation that offers clarity, hope, and even beauty to anyone who wants to understand the disease or its cure. This tenth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author.

Contains mature themes.