Quit while you're ahead...David Carr has a fairly gripping piece in tomorrow's NY Times Magazine about his life and times as a drug addict/dealer/wife beater -- and how he sobered up.
It's funny: Almost all the stories are the same (or, at least, similar: If you've lived to tell the tale, you've obviously cleaned yourself up) and yet I still find most of them extremely exciting and readable. (Exception: 28 Days.) I actually never read any of the James Frey books, but I really liked Augusten Burroughs' Dry. And Seth Mnookin has written extremely wrenching pieces in Slate and Salon about his struggles with addiction. (For the Salon piece, Mnookin's mother wrote a companion article -- which was even more wrenching.)
(Schlub connection? There isn't really one. However, when he was first trying to get custody of his children from his addict/dealer wife, his lawyer says: “You weighed close to 300 pounds. It was in the winter, and you had on a very heavy coat, but it obviously didn’t fit you; it was raggedy. If I had seen you on the street, I would have thought you were homeless, because you were very rough. Your hygiene was bad; your eyes were rheumy.” But, just for the record, even though Carr might have looked a little schlubby, there is little overlap between hopeless addiction and schlubbiness.)
