Junkie Love - Softcover

Shoenfelt, Phil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 009191423X ISBN 13: 9780091914233

Publisher: Ebury Press, 2007

Synopsis

Camden Town. The late 1980s. A hinterland of rundown squats, petty crime and hard drugs.

Amid this sordid milieu, junkies Phil and Cissy go about their daily routine of sex, shooting up and dodging the police. For a while they have each other and nothing else seems to matter. But as their addictions worsen, money runs short and Cissy's psychotic ex-boyfriend is released from prison, their relationship begins to disintegrate into mutual distrust and loathing...

Raw, repellent and yet shot through with mordant wit, Junkie Love is Phil Shoenfelt's semi-fictionalised account of the heroin addiction that almost cost him his sanity and his life.

About this title

Review:

"A nice, nasty read. I enjoyed it a lot" (Nick Cave)

"A fine, gutsy, spare rendering of the drug underworld" (Will Self)

"A modern evocation of classic fin de siecle literature, complete with classy illustrations ... This love affair between a man, a woman and a needle goes the same tender, heartbreaking way as Hubert Selby Jr.'s Requiem for a Dream. From the warm glow of kindred spirits binding with the chemical mix of love and heroin to the suppurating end, Junkie Love is as beautifully written as it is presented." (Bizarre)

"During their time in the underworld, he and his girlfriend learnt painful, strange things about addiction and identity, and he enunciates them beautifully in this heavy little book....essential reading for anyone interested in how things go wrong" (Financial Times)

From the Author:

I wrote Junkie Love shortly after moving to Prague in the
mid-1990's. This was about eight years after finally kicking the habit in
August 1988. Enough time, I think, to fully absorb the experience and to
get it into perspective. I'd been addicted, with a few short breaks, for
much of the previous eleven years, mainly to heroin but also to methadone,
a far more sinister drug and much more difficult to kick. In New York,
where I lived from 1979 to 1984, I'd been very much into heroin-cocaine
cocktails (speedballs), shooting up as many times a day as money would
allow. The smack in NYC was often cut with barbituates, so by the time I
did finally manage to stop my body was quite toxic. What I try to examine
in Junkie Love is what I'd call the psycho-pathology of addiction, and I
think it is this aspect that differentiates it from the plethora of other
books on the subject. In this, I'd put it closer to De Quincey's nineteenth
century classic, Confessions Of An English Opium Eater, than, for example,
Trainspotting. Every addict in the world knows that what he is doing is
stupid, and that he is killing himself slowly, yet the lure of the drug is
so powerful that he finds it impossible to escape. I take a look at this
syndrome and try to understand it in the light of my own experience. It's
possible that there is such a thing as genetic pre-disposition to one type
of addiction or another, whether cigarettes, alcohol, cocaine or heroin.
But to quote the James Brown song, Heroin is the King of all habit-forming
drugs, and no other habit is as difficult to shake. The euphoria it induces
seems to be linked to extreme sexual experience, and in most users the drug
does eventually kill the sex drive. But in the beginning the heroin rush
and the post-rush glow are very much in the same ballpark as the
post-orgasmic glow of intense sex. The feeling of transcendence and the
feeling of escape from mundane reality aren't so different, and both flood
the system with endorphins, the group of neurotransmitters that occur
naturally in the brain. But whereas most people can return from the
post-orgasmic plateau and continue to function in society, the hard drug
addict craves for ever greater extremes and refuses to conform to social
expectations. In other words, the so-called Reality Principle is rejected
in favour of the Pleasure Principle. In a society based upon the former,
this is obviously going to lead to problems for the addict. In Junkie Love,
all such ruminations are within the context of the narrative, and are often
undercut with irony and other distancing effects. Basically it is a love
story involving two people who were too fucked up to ever really stand a
chance.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ebury Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 009191423X
• ISBN 13: 9780091914233
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160