Lisa Levy is a columnist and contributing editor at LitHub and CrimeReads. At the latter she tagged 17 memoirs and novels that grapple with the darkness of addiction, including:
Barney Hoskyns, Never Enough
Hoskyns is best known as a rock critic, the author of many articles for Mojo magazine and books about The Band, Tom Waits, and, tellingly, Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons. His memoir focuses on the five years in his early twenties, after he left Oxford with a first, when he abused heroin and cocaine. What sets Hoskyns’ book apart from a typical addiction memoir is his willingness to do some painful soul searching to find the reasons he started using drugs, what he was running away from: his dependence on drugs freed him from having to make hard decisions about his future. He’s hardly the first writer to compare addiction to romance: both are exercises in which the self willingly submits to an outside force, bringing both pleasure and pain. Yet his slim memoir with its relentless self-exploration is a potent read.
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the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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