A somewhat-repetitive remembrance, but one that powerfully captures the feeling of addiction.
A drug addict-turned-therapist chronicles her journey in this debut memoir.
Holly was a crack-cocaine user for 16 years, and her dependency on the drug contributed to the destruction of two marriages and led to suicide attempts and hospitalization in a psychiatric ward. After achieving sobriety, she earned a master’s degree in psychology and turned toward helping others recover from addiction. In this work, she offers an unflinching remembrance of her life in “crack hell,” with the goal of sharing her story with a wider audience and coming to terms with her drug-ravaged early years: “There are moments when the thought crosses my mind of erasing some if not all of my past,” Holly writes. “But without this disturbing past who would I be today?” The author grew up in a Connecticut housing project. “As a family we had a lot of fun,” she recalls, though there were dark undercurrents of disharmony; her father’s Sunday drinking escalated into a ritual, and her mother, on one occasion, beat her with an extension cord, she says. She entered adulthood with a poor self-image, magnified by feelings of body shame. She started experimenting with marijuana, and later tried crack: “It felt like a ride on a rocket headed towards the stars,” she writes of the first time. “Ecstasy traveled from my head to my toes without missing space in between the two.” Holly is particularly effective at conveying the craving that made her a “full time slave to crack,” devoting most every waking moment to “chasing the dragon.” But the account of her almost-daily encounters with crack gets tedious at times, and she’s somewhat vague about the roots of her addiction, touching only fleetingly on parental neglect, genetics, and poor self-image. Ultimately, however, she shows how she recognized that “What was bad were the choices [I] made,” and that now, at least, she’s made a better choice—“not to relapse. My life has not been perfected.”
A somewhat-repetitive remembrance, but one that powerfully captures the feeling of addiction.Pub Date: July 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5151-2706-2
Page Count: 232
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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