Customer Reviews

Rolling Away: My Agony with Ecstasy

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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!

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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.

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.

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.

Smith's book is well-written and I have great empathy for what she experienced, and for the anti-illegal drug message she promotes. I am concerned, however, with the message she sends in the last chapter when she decides to live "pill free" by throwing away her anti-depressant medications. It's dangerous to equate illegal drugs like ecstacy, which we know are unregulated and can contain any number of harmful ingredients including rat poison, with anti-depressants, as she seems to do in her book. Anti-depressants have saved lives and helped people live better lives. Maybe Smith truly did not need to be on psychiatric medication, but I hope younger readers will not come away believing that anyone who needs such medication is weak. Mental illness is a real medical condition, not something that can be willed away.

This is one of my favorite books. She is open, honest and doesnt hold back. Some reviewers claim shes not an addict she doesnt know but its not about that. its about trying something and before you know it your caught up in this world of self indulgence. she was lucky. she stopped. this book will intrigue anyone who has tried ecstasy, or has wanted to try ecstasy.

Rolling away is a brilliant book. It tells the honest truth about what some people concider to be a harmless pill. For some, once you try ecstasy your hooked; it's hard to break free and Lynn does an excellent job in describing and explaining the horrors that she went through trying to get herself clean. You can go on any website or even google the effects of ecstasy but nothing is better than hearing, well reading in this case, something that actually happened to someone.

Lynn shares her whole life story. She explains how easy it is to get hooked, how it feels to be addicted to something and how hard it can be to get your life back. She tells about the show she was on that MTV aired called, True Life: I'm on ecstasy, and explains about the brain scan that her doctor had done on her and the results are scary but so true.

This book is for anyone that has ever done ecstasy, knowns anyone that has ever done E, or just for anyone that wants a great true story to read.

I am a librarian at a public library in Florida...I just spent the last 40 minutes here at work reading through Lynn's book, which I just brought from our processing unit to the reference department, so that it can be placed out for patrons. This is only the second book, in seven years, that has caught my attention like this. I am blown away by what Lynn has written.

I want to thank Lynn for her willingness to share her story with the world. I will certainly be recommending this book to everyone I can.

I found the author's account of her drug addiction to be rather pathetic, to be honest. I too went through a time in my life, lasting much longer than her, where I couldn't get enough ecstasy. We called them "dumpers" for some reason. Yes, the high times were great, and when it wore off you felt empty and miserable. Blah, blah, blah. So what? It's not like it was the worst time I've ever had in my life. If anything, I had a good time having fun and then I grew up and decided what was truly important in life. Sobriety fits more with what I want to do with the rest of my life. So I quit ecstasy and cocaine. Big deal. It's not like ecstasy is even physically addictive, unlike cigarettes and blow. In fact, I found smoking to be much harder to quit. In summary, I personally found this book to be whiny and shallow.

An ecstacy warning add that used to air a few years ago used to combine shots of an ambulance scene, clips of kids talking about a friend who was lost, and a conclusion from an old man about how the drug kills. I always figured it was a highly ineffective advertisement. Many young kids do recreational drugs like E, but the vast majority of them don't know anyone who died from them.
My own personal observation was that the true tragedies of drug use aren't the tiny portion of users who suffer a sudden death, but the much larger percentage of people who slowly waste away. Good kids from good families who work hard but also like to have some fun every once in a while. It starts with a single experience that is very enjoyable. Then you decide to reward yourself after a hard week of work. Slowly you develop a recreational habit which goes unchecked, and before you know it, you have a full blown addiction on your hands. Not the kind of stuff that makes newspaper headlines or appears in public service announcements, but a waste of a life nonetheless. I saw countless young people full of lots of potential waste away under the radar like this, and I suspect that anyone who does drugs knows a case or two as well.

This is why I highly recommend this book to anyone, those who've had any kind of contact with addiction, but especially those who have not but are concerned about a friend or a family member.

Smith recounts the story of her addiction with humor and poise, and she certainly doesn't white wash how good the highs were to make her point. That is why her message is so affective, and why she can tour the country and successfully communicate the dangers of drugs to young kids. She isn't the prudish old guy in a suit telling them drugs are evil. She is the attractive young woman who's been there, done that, and paid the price, and is there to tell you about how high of a price you could pay while sympathizing with the temptation.

I can't say that I 'liked' reading this book - it was at times painfully sad. All young people should read this book, if only to understand that sometimes you don't get a second chance. Lynn Marie Smith had a once in a lifetime opportunity to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. First, you have to be talented just to get in the door, and then you have to figure out how in the hell you're going to pay for everything, if you're lucky enough to be accepted as a student.

Smith was a casual drug user who became an addict, and later, an MRI would prove that she suffered permanent brain damage from her use of the drug Ecstasy. Once she was out of rehab, her days of being a student over, she was back home with her parents, working a dead-end job and living in a small town.

This is the ultimate truth of what can happen to young people who f--k up their lives with drugs. They might not end up as homeless bag ladies with shopping carts, but being stuck in a low-wage dead-end job is a hell on earth, especially when you had a chance to make the big time, and you blew it.

The author's point of view is refreshing - she acknowledges the role that her parents' dysfunction played, but she does not fully blame them (or anyone else) for her problems.