A Look Back: October Book Review
On Michael Clune's heroin memoir
This month, I read Michael Clune’s memoir, White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin (2013).
Let’s get into it:
White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin by Michael Clune (2013) — In her nonfiction book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021), Maggie Nelson, in one of my favorite reads of the past few years, unpacks freedom through the lens of four categories: art, sex, drugs, and climate. In the chapter dedicated to drugs, she writes:
Despite the legend of immediacy that so often attends drug writing (as in the tale of a speed-addled Jack Kerouac typing On the Road (1957) at 100 words per minute on a 120-foot-long scroll), drug experience is notoriously difficult to represent, either in the moment or in retrospect (“I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was,” Arthur Koestler once quipped about a mushroom trip). As Michael Clune, literary scholar and author of one of the best dope memoirs I've read, White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin (2013), explains (in Writing Against Time), “The literary interest in the description of the striking effects of addictive substances is familiar. Less often noted is the curious divergence of these descriptions from empirical studies of the experiences of addicts, for whom a dulling and deadening of perception is a characteristic of narcotic and alcohol addiction on the sensorium.” In other words, to be “good literature,” drug writing needs to be enlivening, surprising, and gripping, whereas the experiences being narrated are often characterized by monotony, inattentiveness, and vacancy.
With White Out, Clune crafts an immersive memoir that feels like fiction — “enlivening, surprising, and gripping.” He opens by explaining: “My past is infected. I have a memory disease. It grips me through what I can remember. For example, seven years ago in Baltimore, Cat wakes me up to kiss me on her way to work. I’m about to fall back asleep when I remember about Dominic. I remember how fun he can be. I sit up in bed and think about it.” These opening lines collapse linear time, establish the poetic flatness that goes on to shape the book. For instance, one of the most memorable sequences traces Clune’s childhood search for a real-life Candy Land, a pursuit lyrically wrenched into the memory of his first time using. Traditional notions of past and present shatter, and all the stories swirl into one.
Repetition of moments and phrases punctuate a singular narrative continuum. As Clune writes: “Language is a total luxury in a white out. A full sentence is like a Rolex.” Some images, some sequences, sharpen to a point of clarity, while others stay in a state of perpetual refraction, replicating that “dulling and deadening of perception” Clune identifies. In his 2013 review for The New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes: “The book is itself a sketchy map of a blanched aurora borealis. There is a narrative, but it swims murkily, the way Clune himself ‘floated like an astronaut in the white world.’” This stylistic kaleidoscope animates the high of that initial hit, how it warps time by creating what Clune describes as a “rip [that] goes deep, right down to the bone, to the very first time.”
Abandoning moral overtures, Clune captures the nebulousness of recovery and who latches onto it. Lewis-Kraus goes on: “In a sense, the addiction memoir is the simplest form of self-accounting, a grossly distended version of the curve of many people’s lives: I sinned, I sinned repeatedly, my sinning felt beyond my control, I hit something that felt like rock bottom, I realized I wanted to be redeemed, with the help of divine or earthly love I was redeemed, and now I’m here to declare not only that I’m still around but that I’m better than ever, as proven by the existence of this book…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.”
That’s all for now!
xo,
Najet