Rolling Away: My Agony with Ecstasy [Hardcover]

Lynn Marie Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 3, 2005

This all started as a choice, my choice, but now I was slave to it.

Every time I swallowed a pill I was tricking myself into seeing and feeling what was not there. But I could only trick myself for so long....

Lynn Smith never wanted to be an addict. A popular straight-A student from small-town Pennsylvania, she moved to New York City to pursue her dream of acting. In the city, she came in contact with new people, new ideas, and a completely new way of life -- a way that exposed her to drugs. She tried pot, acid, and cocaine, but it was the "love drug" Ecstasy that won her heart. Rolling Away is the story of Lynn's frenzied flight into addiction and her long struggle to come back down to earth. At once harrowing and inspiring, Rolling Away is a triumphant narrative about sex, drugs, and rock-bottom survival -- and how a second chance can save your life.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Aspiring actress Smith dabbled in recreational drug use after moving to New York City from smalltown Pennsylvania. Sadly, the recent high school graduate quickly went from being a casual user to an addict. Smith's descriptions of "rolling" on ecstasy are appropriately disjointed and haunting. She deftly conveys an ecstasy user's sense of euphoria, especially the bubbling happiness that spreads like a wave through an "E"-fueled dance floor. But in tackling recovery, she falters. Although Smith's experience in treatment was difficult, and her description of it lends some insight into her subsequent triumph, she lingers too long in very well-trod territory. Once Smith is out of the hospital, though, the book regains its footing as Smith details her appearance in an MTV special about ecstasy use, and the difficulty of dealing with her somewhat emotionally unhealthy family. Smith has written a fervent cautionary tale; even when revealing the drug's joyful moments, her tone is one of warning and regret. As a member of the advisory board of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, Smith tours and lectures about ecstasy, and it's likely that this work will find wide readership. The book's greatest strength is its alarming passages about coming down from a high and about the emptiness of living for the next pill-popping moment. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Fresh out of high school, Smith arrived at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City with big plans and dreams. She longed to be an actress, but she fell in with a bad crowd and found herself experimenting with ecstasy, cocaine, and acid. A bad acid trip isn't enough to scare her off from the lifestyle, and after graduating she gets involved with Mason, a charismatic and handsome drug dealer who quickly draws Lynn into his aimless, ecstasy-filled existence. The constant drug use finally leads to a breakdown, and Lynn's concerned mother brings her to a hospital and checks Lynn into a rehab program back in her hometown of Danville, Pennsylvania. Smith manages to complete the program only to come home to more challenges (her father is an alcoholic) and unexpected opportunities (MTV wants to do a story on her struggle with addiction). Smith's memoir is a must-read for anyone who views drugs as glamorous--her descriptions of bad trips are very vivid and frightening, and the effort she made to turn her life around is admirable. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Atria; First Edition first Printing edition (May 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743490436
• ISBN-13: 978-0743490436
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #840,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars No rock bottom in this story!, November 25, 2006

By 

Pamela V ""MS V"" (Mississippi Gulf Coast) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Rolling Away: My Agony with Ecstasy (Paperback)

Sorry, Lynn, but being a party girl for five months doesn't make you a recovering addict. The story just isn't that uncommon: Spoiled girl has parents mortgage their home so that she can go to an acting school in New York. Girl is bored and has delusions of grandeur, & is easily taken in by other, more spoiled, rich kids who do recreational drugs to pass the time. (All on daddies dime.) Spoiled girl gets through her "school," is disapointed when she doesn't get auditions for acting jobs, and has to get a job in the real world, waiting tables. Instead of pounding the pavement or trying for auditions, Lynn decides to party hardy and up the drug use. It sounds like 5 months of fun to me! Partying all night - sleeping all day. She mostly had a ball, there was no rock bottom here. She never suffered financially or ended up on the street, all she did was have a semi-breakdown, which caused her to call mommy to come get her and put her in a hospital, which they probably had no insurance for. After Lynn gets out of the hospital, she hangs around moms house for several months, getting a MTV special for writing a 5 minute email, and within a few months - is so bored that she has another "relapse," which makes no sense, except she is just looking for more attention.

Low and behold - Lynn becomes a public speaker - telling hardened criminals how tough it is being an addict. Hello? Does she think her 5 months partying in New York can compare to being raised in the projects while mom's on crack? Has she ever gone without food? And then she goes on Oprah and other talk shows - and writes a book? Congratulations Lynn! Looks like you got the attention you wanted! And for five months on the party circuit!

.
I give this book 2 stars because it is interesting to read about her drug trips. But after she gets out of the mental hospital, it's just drivel.

Go back to New York and tell a street person your story. I'm sure they would trade theirs for yours anyday.

18 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars an exaggeration, June 16, 2006

By 

Amanda - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rolling Away: My Agony with Ecstasy (Hardcover)

I went to the same high school as Lynn...I'd just like to warn any potential readers that the book is full of exaggerations and outright lies. I read the book out of curiosity, and found myself constantly saying "That's not true, that's not how that happened!" Consider yourself warned...this book needs to be read with the same scrutiny as a James Frey book.

18 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A "Reefer Madness" for our time, June 11, 2006

By 

San Albers (HI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rolling Away: My Agony with Ecstasy (Hardcover)

The most offensive and superficial set of flaws in this offensiviely superficial memoir is the typos. Smith (and her editors, sadly) don't know the difference between "affect" and "effect," sometimes using both randomly as the same part of speech in the same sentence; "gauge" is spelled phonetically; a majority of sentences are commas splices. All this and more gives the book a breathless, high-school quality that is perfectly supported by the author's hysterical fear-based revelations: to take pills is bad. The reason I'm not okay is because my mommy married an alcoholic. The world is mean to me.

It's not her fault, (since, as she says repeatedly, her mom wouldn't give her more money, work a third job to support her, rewind her own life to before her marriage, etc.) but Smith rolls enormous self-indulgence and a real biochemical tendency toward schizophrenia into a cautionary tale that completely ignores the psychotherapeutic effects of empathogens like Ecstasy and instead, wraps it up into a fear of all pharmaceuticals including prescribed anti-psychotic and anti-depressant meds.

She's a poster girl for something, but it's not avoidance of drug experimentation based on knowledge, or freedom from drug abuse based on a healthy mind in a healthy body. She's a perfect product of the post-9/11 generation that can only think in black and white terms, and that uses fear and ignorance to bolster narrow-minded conservative agendas. Good for her that she's working for the government now.