Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing: 'A candid, darkly funny book' New York Times

came out screaming, and I didn’t stop screaming. For weeks. I was a colicky kid—my stomach was a problem from the very start. My parents were being driven crazy by the amount I was crying. Crazy? Concerned, so they hauled me off to a doctor. This is 1969, a prehistoric time compared to now. That said, I don’t know how advanced civilization has to b

I’m not the biggest fan of confrontation. I ask a lot of questions. Just not out loud.

Nobody has a drinking problem and then stops and then drinks socially and it’s fine. The disease just picks up.

If you give me all the OxyContin I can stand, I feel taken care of, and when I’m taken care of, I can take care of everybody else and look outward and be in service to someone. But without medication, I feel that I would just sputter away into a sea of nothingness.

Panic set in. My bag was full. I was not high. There was nothing separating me from me. I felt like a little kid scared of monsters in the dark. But was I the monster?

idea, you give the drug to the child, the child stops crying. It was a different time. There I was, on the knee of my stressed mother, screaming over her twenty-one-year-old shoulder as some dinosaur in a white coat, barely looking up from his wide oak desk, tutted under his bad breath at “parents these days,” and wrote a script for a major addicti