White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin
“Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by The New Yorker, NPR's On Point, and The Millions”"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“An astonishing new book!White Outis 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“A terrific memoir”  – Clancy Marin, The Chronicle of Higher Education"A deeply thought-through, reasonable, unified, maybe teachable understanding of memory and self and habit."--Tao Lin,The Believer"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 writtenJesus' Son."- Ben Lerner, author ofLeaving the Atocha Station.“Raw, fresh, and relevant,White Outtranscends 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 ofDiscovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Researchand co-author ofThe 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"A memoir that reads like a lost modernist novel---James Joyce as a junkie in modern day Baltimore. James Frey eat your heart out."-Adam Wilson, The Millions