Customer Reviews

Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

You know how sometimes a book is a friend? You ignore your family and your work and getting sleep because you've just met a brand new best friend? That's how nice the book Drugs Are Nice is. Are. Line after line after wow after whoa after no way, she lived this and came out of it funnier and smarter and even more able to distill beauty, dripping it in perfect drops across her uterus-wrenching prose? Seriously? Seriously. Lisa Carver makes me want to write, and every time she writes another book, it gets better, which means I have to get better, which means we all do.

Right after "Good Vibrations", a little song called "Pennyface" is my favorite song of all time. Every once in a while i hear it on a mix tape and think, "what ever happened to Lisa Suckdog"? I was in a bookstore yesterday when I saw some familair words in pink lettering on this book's spine and was staggered with vague memories. Reading the copy on the back cover I was truly enticed and figured that for a few bucks it would be worth finding out "whatever happened". I guess she never really went away and has fascinated a bunch of people younger than I and this isn't even her first book. Nevertheless, in those great days before some loser named Kurt signed a big money contract, Lisa Carver was among a dingy pantheon of musicians (or whatever) who were truly fascinating, inspiring, and confounding to me. I would not have guessed however that reading a memoir about one of the dingiest in the pantheon - glorious Pennyface notwithstanding - would be so fascinating, inspiring and confounding as well. Her story is much more interesting than I would have guessed and she tells it with surprising eloquence and verve. Any time she writes about her father is particularly riveting. As for her life in the underground world... Those days... those days were incredibly fun and mysterious. But her book reminds me that they were also desperate - emotionally and fiscally - and perilous. The person who wrote this book 'got' at a young age that she could stare down the nightmare and come back for more just for the sheer aliveness of it all. And that aliveness is all we have.

There aren't that many drugs in this book - Lisa's whole way of thinking and living are the drug. Her writing, especially in her fabulous magazine Rollerderby, has always been intoxicating. When you drink it, you enter the secret twisted world just under the surface of the normal-seeming one, where everything is fascinating and sexy and on fire. In Drugs Are Nice, she takes that passion for exploring weirdness and turns it on herself, and you know it's going to be entertaining but it's also a serious and genuine study of an amazing life. From a uniquely messed-up relationship with her drug dealer father, to becoming the star of the underworld, to her nightmarish time with industrial musician Boyd Rice and having a child with serious health problems - every chapter of this book seems like the climax. Every chapter is full of characters too intriguingly warped to have been made up. It's the history of an underground movement, and the Boyd Rice part is a horror novel that you can't put down until the horrible end. But the best thing is that over the course of the book you are watching Lisa slowly become human, watching her come to understand what motivates her and develop a heart that can love. You end up quite moved as well as burst into flames.

This is a brilliantly written book that is probably too unique to be in the tradition of something like the LIARS' CLUB, yet is every bit as compelling. As Lisa finds her way amidst sociopathic parents and her own rather odd tendencies, she records unforgettable vignettes of the similarly and disimilarly deranged (i.e. Smog, Dame Darcy, Costes, Boyd Rice). She has a tendency to smash her life open like some nuclear physicist intent on studying the particles that fly out. The insights she gathers from these extremities are not merely flash powder. There is always relevance--however strange--amidst the huge amount of released energy.

The below negative review dwells on scatalogical points that comprise maybe a page of the book. This review was written by one of Boyd Rice's friends (and in the spirit of full disclosure, I'm one of Lisa's). If you read the book, you'll understand why Boyd is a tad reluctant to be exposed in such a light. He is an interesting and magnetic man, yet like most gods and demigods, has clay feet that show here and there. Anton LaVey's odd family life is also sketched. Personally, I might have been a bit more entertained by/ forgiving of his foibles yet Lisa has high standards for conduct (in certain areas such as parenting) even amidst her own tendencies toward debauchery. Though I can see how such exposure might make one uncomfortable, isn't all publicity good publicity? Maybe not. Apparently, someone (or several someones) is (are) so mad about this book that Lisa and her publisher have been receiving threats. It's great publicity plus gives gainful employment to a certain ex-Navy seal. Ah, the drama. . . . Look for lots of negative reviews from Church of Satan people who probably haven't read the book.

Oh, wait, am I not supposed to review my own book? Anyway, I don't love it. I hate it! I can't even look at it! But you could...

I want to say "You won't be able to put it down!" but I did put it down for an hour or so. I had to. Lisa's writing is so vivid that if you've lived through any of her more unpleasant experiences yourself, it almost brings them to life in a too real, too close-to-home way. I put it down, caught my breath, picked it back up again, and then I felt guilty when I insisted everyone borrow it from me when I was finished. I should be insisting they buy their own copies, shouldn't I?

I picked this little gem from the shelves of a sanitized chain book store. I don't know what prompted the choice - maybe it was idle curiosity, a little perversity, belated teenage rebellion. Maybe it was because I thought it would be a memoir about drugs - something in the vein of Christiane F, or a Million Little Pieces (which I enjoyed, in spite of Oprah and everything that came after), with a little more of a rock'n'roll feel.

What I found was something quite different to any expectation I might have started with. The drugs in the title barely rated a mention, although some of Lisa's wild friends are drug users. No, it was a very different memoir of a very different life. A life of extremes, of pushing the edge, of finding a new edge and jumping right off it. The tales of her life are exciting; creating live stage shows to shock and bewilder the audience, running away to Paris to marry a strange man, being drawn back to the States with more strange men, embodying ever more closely the shadow her father cast over her. And her escape from the one who finally manages - briefly - to clamp a dark control over her indomitable spirit.

Her ability to make a life, and a living for herself, and eventually for her son, is quite amazing. Her creativity and spirit burn through the pages of the book. Her enduring friendship with Rachel, her unconventional marriage to the bizarre Jean Louis and her eternally positive relationship with her sick and disabled son Wolf reverberate with life.

The passion, enthusiasm and ultimate innocence with which Lisa Crystal Carver hurls herself at every aspect of life is completely refreshing. A wild ride. Very real. Read it.

I thought I lived it up in my youth, but Lisa puts me to shame shame shame. I put the kids to bed early every night because I know this book is on my night table waiting for me to dive back in and escape my quotidian life. Thanks Lisa, for writing such a riveting book!

This is one of the bravest books I've ever read. In the age of faux-memoir and carefully groomed public personas, Lisa Carver has the brass ovaries to reveal herself, warts and all, on the page. I'm impressed, moved, shocked (at times), concerned (at times), and disgusted (at times) by the flow of confessions. The most distinctive thing about the book, though, is the way Lisa Carver combines raw self-revelation with eloquence and clarity. I'm not sure I'd want to be stranded on a desert island with Lisa Carver the real-life person, but I'd gladly take her writing with me!

Many readers are, understandably, wary of memoirs written by people who aren't yet pushing 70, but "Drugs Are Nice" is very much an exception. Carver has "lived" more than most ever will, and this book indicates volumes of autobiography yet to come. It's also unusual for a memoir in that it is written entirely in the present tense, and the voice seems to "mature" over the course of the book (ala Joyce in "Portrait of the Artist . . .") giving a greater sense of the time covered, despite the feeling of immediacy produced by the former technique. Neither of these technical aspects come off as gimmicky, both are actually quite subtle and effective, but I think the latter might be the reason some readers have been bothered by the way the narrative changes toward the end. I'm pretty damn certain it was done deliberately. At any rate, if you're just looking for sex, drugs and rock n' roll, you'll find them here, but not without a heavy dose of genuine sadness. This book is more reflective than celebratory, and frequently more tragic than titillating. Those qualities, however, made the experience all the more rewarding for me. I'm looking forward to more from Lisa Carver.