Addicted (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

Description

The brainchild of poets Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane, Addicted is a very compelling anthology of personal essays devoted to a subject close--often way too close--to the hearts of the writers involved. That is their addictions, be it to booze, cigarettes, heroin, or self-destruction in general. For the most part, the contributors--a roster that includes Crozier, Lane, Marnie Woodrow, and Evelyn Lau, among others--relate stories of recovery, but it is often of a very fragile kind. Writer and fabled bank-robber Stephen Reid writes of losing his boyhood to morphine at the age of 11, and how every hit since has been part of a quest back to "the place before loss." A lifelong smoker until his health began to fail, broadcaster Peter Gzowski claims that "there are almost no photographs of me after the age of 17 in which I do not have a cigarette either in my hand or dangling from my lips." Until he quit drinking in 1982, Giller Prize-winning novelist David Adams Richards believed, like most of the writers here, that his lifestyle was inseparable from his work, and to change the former would endanger the latter. "After all," he writes in Addicted, "I was a writer--and all the writers whose work I cared for drank." Even though the subject matter might seem very limited, each writer has a distinct and, of course, very personal approach, and the results on the whole are raw, frank, and engaging. Most seem to attribute their addictions to a shared litany of causes--childhood trauma, emotional problems, delusions of grandeur, bad genes--but none of the contributors asks for your pity. --Jason Anderson