The book-buying public’s appetite for addiction memoirs has hardly abated, many of them providing tidy endings for the authors’ troubled lives. In a recent Book Beast essay, author Joshua Lyon explains how editing his painkiller addiction memoir rewrites actually sent him back to drugs.
The dark essay confronts a fundamental contradiction: his new book, “Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict” was supposed to be a cautionary tale, but the author had relapsed. It’s an issue that all memoir writers should consider as they re-visit difficult memories.
Check it out: “My agent finally caved and told my editor that I was in rehab after she had unsuccessfully tried to reach me a few times. I only found out after getting kicked out of rehab a day early, due to lack of insurance money. The shock of getting pulled out of group therapy and being told to pack my bags and leave was like waking up from a five-year coma–the world outside was different and scary and new. I ended up inviting a guy I’d met in rehab to move in with me, thinking that having him there would help keep me clean.”