Within the last few years there has been a spike in the number of books chronicling teenage addicts of all sorts.
Readers should negate these fictive tracts of phony sentimental garbage and go right back to the source: Jim Carroll’s 1978 memoir, The Basketball Diaries.
The memoir follows a young Carroll from the age of 12 to 16, detailing his everyday life and experiences as he grows up in New York City. Carroll is a junkie.
He robs old women, breaks into businesses, beats people up for chump change, and even becomes a boy prostitute to keep his habit fed.
This is not one of your run of the mill addiction stories. There is a sense of innocence to the writing.
Carroll consistently charts his progression—from trying heroin for the first time, to getting hooked, to the downward spiral of narcotic delirium—while attempting to search for something pure, something holy.
To complement the action and story of the memoir, the reader witnesses brilliant writing from the hands of a teenager, offering a fresh perspective on a period of time that has often been left to the adults to relegate.
We see teenage angst, the terrors of growing up during the Cold War, the plight of New York City as it falls into urban decay.
However, Carroll takes on an almost nonchalant approach to these things in his writing, offering the wisdom that only a hardened city kid can.
As the jacket of the book proclaims, “He’s a wise-ass kid getting wiser on the streets of New York.”
The attitude of this does not last, though. As the memoir progresses, and as his dependency on heroin intensifies, Carroll begins to lose that wisdom and to embrace fear.
There is a feeling of sympathy evoked within the reader for Jim Carroll.
Part of the reason for this sympathy is due to the use of heroin as a character within the memoir.
When he’s on it, the passages have a relaxed intensity about them, this laissez-faire attitude about life’s problems and his dying city.
When he’s off of it, the reader is exposed to the harsh realities of the blighted New York—junkies, street crime, extreme poverty, and an almost apathetic approach to life in general.
As Carroll withdraws, the reader withdraws, hoping that he will find heroin soon and whisk us away from the underworld of rotting Manhattan.
We experience the shakes, the chills, the sweats with him, and when he gets a hit, we get one as well.
You will not be able to find another teenage memoir about addiction as emotive as this one. This is pure heart-pounding, gut-wrenching, filthy autobiography with soul.
This is a memoir so real that you can feel the grime, smell the sewers, taste the polluted air, and hear the busy sounds of the inner city.
Read this now.
Conner McDonough can be reached at cmcdonough@spartans.ut.edu.