Lyrics, ideas for poems, ideas for newspaper pieces, preposterous diagrams for joysticks and wired-up boxing gloves that would work as sound-effects triggers. These are two notes I left for myself in November 1999: I’m mostly writing drug stories. I have them. People read them. I know a famous actor who was a regular on Page Six, going in and out of nightclubs, in the heyday of the Hilton sisters and the Olsen twins. He struggled with cocaine and painkillers but was embarrassed to talk about it. “Addiction stories are clichéd,” he said. You’re a storyteller, I told him. You know how few essential stories there are. This one is new, how often does that happen? It’s up there with Boy Meets Girl Boy Loses Girl, Man Challenges the Gods and Is Punished, Rags to Riches. Joking cynically with friends, I’ve called this book a JADN: just another drug narrative. We, the addicts, keep writing them, but nearly everything we have to say has already been expressed just in the title of Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story.
