READING MATTERS –
Jan. 8, 2024 – Michael Clune’s White Out is among the most intense and intellectually thrilling books on opiate addiction. Clune was a promising postdoc in English literature, but just a few years earlier his life had been touch and go, as he juggled the competing demands of grad school and heroin addiction.
The publishing history of Michael Clune’s memoir White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin straddles these two eras: It came out in 2013, the year the US government first acknowledged an opioid epidemic, but was largely written in the late 2000s, at the tail end of the addiction-memoir boom. At the time, Clune was a promising postdoc in English literature, but just a few years earlier his life had been touch and go, as he juggled the competing demands of grad school and heroin addiction. Sometimes the two paired nicely: On heroin, Clune writes, “the shapes of thoughts, sentences, and phenomena grew solid outlines, stood still, and let me copy them down in my essays.” More often, he’d found himself too sick, or crazed, or both, to make much headway on his coursework. Now in the process of recovery, he found himself compulsively reading every addiction memoir he could find.
