Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

WHITE OUT

Michael W. Clune

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. Clune's 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, Clune's 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.

Michael W. Clune is an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University.
Available products
Book

Published 2013-04-01 by Hazelden

Comments

"Disturbing, brilliant, hilarious--it's as if Proust had written Jesus' Son." --Ben Lerner, author of Leaving the Atocha Station

"Clune's razor-sharp description of the magical first time he got high exemplifies why this stands out among dime-a-dozen addiction memoirs. At its best, this chronicle keenly touches on the devastations of heroin with disciplined literary flair." (starred review) Read more...

"The unusual risk taken by Clune's unusually good addiction memoir is its enduring lyrical reverence for heroin. The heroin is so close you can see the white. It hasn't been relegated to the past. It has an honest and dangerous smile. It's right here, whitely licking its chops." --Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker "His style is direct and confessional, and draws attention to the humour in addiction. He also writes about his theory of addiction... The novelty doesn't come from the feeling of doing the drug, which Clune says ‘starts to suck pretty quickly'. Instead it's the image, and the persistent newness of the image, that keeps him coming back." --Miranda Critchley, London Review of Books. "An astonishing new book! White Out is more than a recovery memoir. It is a phenomenology of heroin addiction--the single best thing I have read about the drug--and a deep, often beautiful meditation on the nature of memory, pleasure, and time." --Lorin Stein, The Paris Review Daily "A terrific memoir." --Clancy Marin, The Chronicle of Higher Education "A deeply thought-through, reasonable, unified, maybe teachable understanding of memory and self and habit." --Tao Lin, The Believer