I’d been working on my second novel for a while before I realised what it was really about. I’d been thinking about online lives, about how social networking allows us to present multiple versions of ourselves to the world, identities that are both highly curated and tightly controlled. At the same time, I’d been musing on how our sense of self is never really fixed, yet we tell ourselves one historical narrative, constantly rewritten to make sense of the changes in our lives. It can be all too easy to look back on the person that we “used to be”, on the road-no-longer-travelled, with a fondness and regret that are often misplaced.
I realised that it was this multiplicity of self that I wanted to write about. A character, Julia, began to emerge, but the wheels were still spinning until a friend said to me, “You know, addiction is a very patient disease.” That one phrase became the key that unlocked the novel; I began to see addiction as something cunning, lying in wait, biding its time. I realised it would form the backbone of the book: Julia would be a recovering addict, someone haunted by her past, yet also in some way nostalgic for it. She would come to see the internet as a means to explore the life she might have had, not realising that conquering one addiction does not mean conquering them all. Like many of us, her battle would ultimately be with herself. Here, then, are my top 10 books featuring addiction, in some form or other.
1. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon
All addiction is an avoidance of pain, and in this book Ruth – labelled “She-Devil” by her philandering husband and determined to live up to the title – avoids hers by undertaking a series of meaningless sexual encounters once he leaves her for Mary. But ultimately her addiction is not to sex: she is doing it only to anaesthetise herself to intimacy. Unable to forgive, she has dedicated her entire self to first destroying, and then becoming, her rival. Envy is her addiction, then. That, and revenge.
2. The Shining by Stephen King
Jack Torrance, an ex-alcoholic, thinks he’s on safe ground when he spends the winter in a hotel whose bars are empty. But the hotel has other ideas and it’s not long before a ghostly bartender is serving him gin that is all too real, opening the doors to the return of the alcoholism he thought he’d conquered. A lesson in the vigilance necessary if an addiction is to remain beaten, made all the more poignant for King’s own battles with alcohol.
3. Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
Bleakly comic, this tells the story of Victor, a man who has sex in order to avoid life, rather than embrace it, and as a distraction from his damaged relationship with his mother. And where does this sex addict go to find partners? Sex-addiction support groups, of course. Like I said, bleakly comic.
4. Gordon by Edith Templeton
Banned in the 1960s, and largely based on true events, this is an extraordinarily brave book. It’s the story of a young woman’s submissive affair with an older man who picks her up in a pub and to whom she surrenders almost everything. Perhaps not a story of addiction as much as of obsession, nevertheless this cold, almost dispassionate book, tells of a life overtaken in ways both unexpected and unlooked for, and deserves a place on this list.
5. Love Junkie: A Memoir by Rachel Resnick
The story of Resnick’s addiction to “undesirable, dangerous men”, this book skilfully articulates the reasons she found herself hooked on bad relationships, and the ways in which she was replaying the patterns of her childhood. It’s raw and honest, difficult but worthwhile.
6. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
At heart, this is a book about friendship, but featuring friends bonded through addiction. Heroin features heavily, but Welsh shows us the spectrum of addictive behaviours. We have sex, theft, and most memorably Begbie, who considers himself morally superior to his “junkie” friends, even though he is addicted to amphetamines, alcohol and violence. It’s dark, deceptively complex, and shines with humanity for the characters it refuses to condemn.
7. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher
Addiction usually concerns excess, rather than denial, and I hesitated before including this unflinching account of Hornbacher’s battles with a severe eating disorder in the list. But it strikes me that her story of obsessive control, of an overwhelming need to do something even though one knows it might ultimately kill you, is as much about addiction as anything else. It’s essential reading for anyone who still believes eating disorders are just about how thin someone wants to look.
8. Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby, Jr
Everyone has dreams, and in this book everyone becomes addicted to trying to attain theirs. Sara wants to be thin enough to look good on television and ends up addicted to the amphetamines in her diet pills. Her son and his friends want to raise money and end up addicted to the heroin they were planning to sell. It’s pretty strong stuff.
9. The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll
The story of Carroll’s adolescent years in New York, his high-school basketball career, and his addiction to heroin, which began when he was 13 years old. It’s an edited version of the diaries he kept at the time, and is incredibly frank and extraordinarily intimate.
10. In My Skin by Kate Holden
This is a beautifully written account of Kate’s journey from a comfortable middle-class life in the suburbs of Melbourne, via an addiction to heroin, to a life of prostitution. It’s far from self-pitying, and her description of the pride she took in her work, which some may feel is at odds with her feminism, is deeply affecting. Her next book, The Romantic, continues the story as Kate begins to rediscover herself in Rome.
