How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z - Softcover

Marlowe, Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860495427 ISBN 13: 9781860495427

Publisher: Basic Books, 1999

Synopsis

eaving personal history (Marlowe used Heroin for 7 years) with aphorisms and analysis, "How To Stop Time" looks at Society through the lens - sometimes clouded and sometimes magnified - of Heroin use.

About this title

Review

Don't expect to probe the mind of a woman whose life was ruined by heroin, because Ann Marlowe won't take you down that road. Instead, her provocatively structured memoir, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A To Z, follows the life of an upper-class addict who makes no apologies for the pictures she fails to paint.

Marlowe is the antithesis of the junkie stereotype. Throughout her seven-year addiction, she never shot up, never lived on the street, and never resorted to selling drugs or her body to sustain her habit. In short, she never bottomed out. As a result, readers with the preconception that all druggies end up on the dark side may put this book down and ask, "What's interesting about her addiction?" Ironically, it is precisely this absence of severity that makes Marlowe's memoir intriguing. The fact that her own game with heroin ends in a draw gives her an unusual perspective on the friends, lovers, and dealers whose luck ran out and who lost everything.

The memoir's alphabetically arranged entries read more like loosely connected essays than actual chapters, at times giving the book a slightly disjointed feel. She doles out the details of her addiction in bits and pieces, interjecting snippets of her youth, an acute look at the drug "problem" in the United States, and the gradual progression of her habit along the way. She describes her addiction as a method of slowing down time in an effort to impose order on her chaotic life, and a way of becoming vulnerable and daring all in one moment. Declaring it an act of free will, Marlowe speaks of a life with heroin as few have envisioned: one of restraint, consciousness, self-discipline, and very little guilt. --Melissa Asher

From the Publisher

How to Stop Time was chosen one of the top 25 books of 1999 by The Village Voice.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1860495427
• ISBN 13: 9781860495427
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 303