I think I was 13 or 14 when I first read Wir Kinder from Bahnhof Zoo
from Christiane F. It’s a true story about a German girl in the seventies who
starts to experiment with marihuana, moves on to try different pills and by the
time she is 14 she is a heroin-addict and a prostitute behind the train station
(Bahnhof Zoo) in Berlin. I found it fascinating that someone who was my age at
the time had such a different life, and I was most intrigued by the fact that
drugs could make you do things that I thought no one would ever have to do. After
this book I read a couple other books about addicts and addiction of which I
cannot find the English versions online anywhere. And for mandatory English
reading in high school I read Trainspotting
from Irvine Welsh. Both of these books are films too, if you don’t like
reading.
I love reading about drug addiction, because I find it
fascinating how drugs can change someone’s sense of what is important in life. The
main reason though is that I’m curious what it feels like to take drugs but at
the same time I am reluctant to try it for myself (okay I have tried a few
things myself, but that is nothing compared to the people in these books). So I
love the detailed descriptions of what it feels like to shoot up heroin so that
I never have to try that myself. I live my junkie-life vicariously through
these books.
Currently, I have
almost finished reading Memoirs of an Addicted Brain
by Marc Lewis, who is a neuroscientist himself. I’ll soon tell you what I thinkabout it!
Put Beautiful Boy and Drinking: A Love Story on your list....
ReplyDeleteThanks for you suggestion!
DeleteI think that ingestion of a persons drug of choice (in my case alcohol) feels different to the addict versus the non addict. When I describe how alcohol makes me feel, people who are alcoholics nod knowingly, and non alcoholics are baffled.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment and please write a blog post about that!
Delete