Race Among the Ruins
by Laurie Woolever
This Book I Read is a new Flaming Hydra series about books worth talking about
How To Stop Time: Heroin From A to Z
By Ann Marlowe
(Basic Books, 1999)
I don’t much remember what I was reading in 1999 apart from aspirational cookbooks, David Sedaris, long-form stories in GQ, and the New York Observer back when it was a proper (pink) paper. For sure though, I was wholly unaware of How To Stop Time: Heroin From A to Z, a series of 130 short, interrelated essays organized under alphabetized titles (“busy,” “capitalist,” “dentistry”) by journalist Ann Marlowe, also published that year. This memoir of a dope-addled but functional life in the ’90s is quiet and circumspect, unsentimental and confident in the author’s conviction that heroin is at best a path to isolating boredom, and to getting oneself hopelessly stuck. There are parties and hilarious close calls with the law, friends who don’t make it and brushes with glamour, but those are brief flashes in a larger, darker picture of loneliness, flu-like bouts of nausea, ennui, delusion and self-loathing.
Published four years before the blockbuster fabulism of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, Marlowe’s clear-headed, unromantic account of her experiences with heroin could not be farther from the histrionic and self-aggrandizing nostalgie de la boue typical of celebrated 20th-century addiction memoirs: I was the very worst, so now I am the very best boy of all.
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