Description:

An In-Depth Look into the Life and Mind of a Heroin Addict

"Then I see a white-topped vial. Wow. I stare at it. It's the first time I've ever seen it. I know I've seen it ten thousand times before. I know it only leads to bad things. I know I've had it and touched it and used it and shaken the last particles of white from the thin deep bottom one thousand times. But there it is. And it's the first time I've ever seen it." --Excerpted from White Out

How do you describe an addiction in which the 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, and vivid? Michael W. Clune's original, edgy yet literary telling of his account of life inside the heroin underground reads like no other, as we enter the mind of the addict and navigate the world therein. After his descent into addiction, we go with him through detox, treatment, and finally into recovery as he returns to his childhood home. There his heroin-induced "white out" begins to fade.

Review

"An astonishing new book! White Out is more than a recovery memoir. It is a phenomenology of heroin addiction—the single best thing I have read about the drug—and a deep, often beautiful meditation on the nature of memory, pleasure, and time."
—Lorin Stein, The Paris Review Daily

"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

"Clune's razor-sharp description of the magical first time he got high exemplifies why this stands out among dime-a-dozen addiction memoirs. …At its best, this chronicle keenly touches on the devastations of heroin with disciplined literary flair."
- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Disturbing, brilliant, hilarious--it's as if Proust had written Jesus' Son."
- Ben Lerner, author of Leaving the Atocha Station.

"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 Candy Land, 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 and co-author of The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America’s First Prison for Drug Addicts

"The book works on many levels. It's a cautionary tale full of black, self-deprecating humor. The writing is hip, bleak and funny."
– Michael Heaton, The Plain Dealer

"Clune analyzes the power of addiction, calling it a 'deep memory disease,' the 'white out' of his future when he was using and of his past."
— Barbara McIntyre, Akron Beacon Journal

About the Author

Michael W. Clune is an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University and is the author of a scholarly book on American literature published by Cambridge University Press.