The tenth-anniversary edition of Michael Clune's classic memoir of addiction and recovery: "Dreamily exact . . . sensual and hilarious . . . One of the year's best books" (The New Yorker).
How do you describe an addiction in which your 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, vivid? Michael W. Clune's story takes us straight inside such an addiction--what he calls "the memory disease."
With dark humor, and in crystalline prose, Clune's account of life inside the heroin underground reads like no other. Whisking us between the halves of his precarious double life--between the streets of Baltimore and the college classroom, where Clune is a graduate student teaching literature--we spiral along with him as he approaches rock bottom: from nodding off in a row house with a one-armed junkie and a murderous religious freak to having his life threatened in a Chicago jail while facing a felony possession charge.
After his descent into addiction, we follow Clune through detox, treatment, and finally into recovery as he returns to his childhood home, where the memory disease and his heroin-induced white out begin to fade. White Out is more than a memoir. It is a rigorous investigation that offers clarity, hope, and even beauty to anyone who wants to understand the disease or its cure. This tenth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author.
Show moreThe tenth-anniversary edition of Michael Clune's classic memoir of addiction and recovery: "Dreamily exact . . . sensual and hilarious . . . One of the year's best books" (The New Yorker).
How do you describe an addiction in which your 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, vivid? Michael W. Clune's story takes us straight inside such an addiction--what he calls "the memory disease."
With dark humor, and in crystalline prose, Clune's account of life inside the heroin underground reads like no other. Whisking us between the halves of his precarious double life--between the streets of Baltimore and the college classroom, where Clune is a graduate student teaching literature--we spiral along with him as he approaches rock bottom: from nodding off in a row house with a one-armed junkie and a murderous religious freak to having his life threatened in a Chicago jail while facing a felony possession charge.
After his descent into addiction, we follow Clune through detox, treatment, and finally into recovery as he returns to his childhood home, where the memory disease and his heroin-induced white out begin to fade. White Out is more than a memoir. It is a rigorous investigation that offers clarity, hope, and even beauty to anyone who wants to understand the disease or its cure. This tenth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author.
Show moreMichael Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. His academic books include A Defense of Judgment, Writing Against Time, and American Literature and the Free Market. Clune's work has appeared in venues ranging from Harper's Magazine, Salon, and Granta to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PMLA, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has been recognized by fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and others. He is currently the Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. His debut novel, PAN, will be published by Penguin Press on July 22, 2025.
"If you've ever wanted to know what an exceptional critical mind
looks like on drugs, read White Out. This book is full of enduring
insights about time, literature, and memory; it is also a hilarious
and scandalous and frightening chronicle of full-blown heroin
addiction (and graduate school!). This might be the best book about
drugs since [Baudelaire's] Les Paradis Artificiels." --Ben Lerner,
The New Yorker, Best Books of the Year
"A poetic memoir of wit and sharp observation, Clune's work reveals
the world of a heroin addict . . . Clune's razor-sharp description
of the magical first time he got high exemplifies why this stands
out among dime-a-dozen addiction memoirs . . . This chronicle
keenly touches on the devastations of heroin with disciplined
literary flair." --Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"White Out is among the most intense and intellectually thrilling
books on opiate addiction . . . [A] decade hasn't dulled its
brilliance: White Out describes addiction's mortifications with a
precision and intensity that shames the prose of not just the
average addiction memoir but of contemporary literary nonfiction as
a whole. It is 'about' addiction in the same sense that Lolita--a
key Clune text--is 'about' pedophilia: overwhelmingly so, but also
incidentally, with the ostensible subject serving as pretext for
the play of language and the careful chiselling of a bruised,
ironic, complexly self-despising sensibility . . . At once deeply
compelling and deeply strange." --Daniel Kolitz, The Nation
"White Out is an excellent book--abject, beautiful, funny, profane,
truly, truly terrifying--and it made me read Clune's criticism and
essays in a very different light." --Merve Emre
"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
"A deeply thought-through, reasonable, unified, maybe teachable
understanding of memory and self and habit." --Tao Lin, The
Believer
"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
"A memoir that reads like a lost modernist novel--James Joyce as a
junkie in modern day Baltimore. James Frey eat your heart out."
--Adam Wilson, The Millions
"Raw, fresh, and relevant, White Out transcends the recent rash of
addiction memoirs to meditate upon addiction as a disease of
memory. Like an avalanche in a haunted CandyLand, this book is an
onslaught of connections between past and present, between a
blizzard of writing and the blank world of terminal addiction."
--Nancy D. Campbell, PhD, author of Discovering Addiction: The
Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research
"The best book ever written about drugs." --Jordan Castro, Red
Scare Podcast
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