"In 2013, Hazelden Publishing, the book-production arm of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the famous Minnesota-based treatment center for drug and alcohol addiction, released a book called White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin,by an English professor named Michael Clune. To say that it seemed like a departure from the collections of daily meditations and 12-step affirmations that compose much of the Hazelden list-staples full of what David Foster Wallace called the "polyesterishly banal" language of recovery-would be putting it mildly."
"The contours of White Out are basically familiar: A 20-something man trying to write a Ph.D. dissertation becomes possessed by a fierce heroin addiction. His recovery narrative is conventional enough-he keeps failing and failing and failing again to get clean, before finally getting forced into sobriety by the threat of prison time and by family pressure. White Out possesses the quest element that propels many a recovery memoir-except that in Clune's case, the quest for sobriety is until the end consistently subordinated to the quest"
Hazelden Publishing issued White Out in 2013 through the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation's book arm, then later let it go out of print before a 10th-anniversary reissue by McNally Editions. The work departs from Hazelden's typical meditations and 12-step affirmations by using dark, fragmented, impressionistic prose rich in irony and black humor. The narrative centers on a twenty-something Ph.D. student who becomes consumed by heroin, repeatedly failing to get clean until external threats force sobriety. Much of the account lyrically celebrates initial transcendence and privileges the pursuit of drugs over sustained recovery.
Read at The Atlantic
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