It gave me a great deal of material. A writer can profit by something that someone else may not be able to profit from at all. Yet they were very disagreeable experiences. The question was real but it couldn't be said with too much intensity. Then it would sound melodramatic.
Any basic experience is like that, like being in prison for a long time.
Nobody who hasn't been there knows what it means. Later books were surrealist extensions of that realistic biographical novel. Addiction gave him the impetus as well as the material. Instead I told him how I had found something deadly honest in the addicts I had known, at least when you didn't have the power to give or withhold anything from them. Falseness, it seemed to me, had been burned away.