This is not an immediately engaging book. The story of a middleclass girl growing up in Los Angeles suburbia and descending into heroin addiction is told through a series of A to Z references. The somewhat clinical format takes us from A for "abstention" to Y for "youth", taking in D for "dealer" and G for "glamour" along the way. Marlowe builds a glamourless mosaic, constructing the story of a comfortably conventional teenager, growing up in comfortably conventional society of which one facet is, naturally, an obsession with illegal drugs. In Marlowe's world the main drug is heroin. Almost autobiographical, the story is written from the perspective of an author who left home to study at Harvard and became a financial analyst, a management consultant and a journalist, while also becoming a heroin addict. Marlowe has not used heroin for over five years, which perhaps enabled her to write this book without ostentatious emotion. It is above all a calm look at middle-class heroin addiction and an honest analysis of how an obsessed society mythologises it. Not immediately engaging, but rapidly compelling.
