Inner lives, woman traveler, spoiled kid

The Baltimore Sun

Gut Feelings

The Intelligence of the Unconscious

Gone to the Crazies

A Memoir

By Alison Weaver

HarperCollins / 245 pages / $24.95

Socrates noted that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what of the life over-examined by others? Alison Weaver was born the child of privilege. Her father was wealthy, her mother, nearly 30 years his junior, a Manhattan trophy wife who drank. Weaver attended the best schools but felt alienated and alone. She filled the void with extraordinary amounts of drugs and alcohol. Her adolescence defined acting out. When Weaver's behavior began to tilt off the Richter scale of acceptability, her parents sent her to the radical re-programming at Cascade School, where the primal scream was pandemic. There Weaver learned how to expel her demons and stay straight. But the lessons didn't take. As soon as Weaver returned to New York from the austere and regimented world of Cascade, she was using every drug she could get her hands on, hanging out at raves chugging Ecstasy like candy, and finally settling on crystal meth as her delirium of choice. Her antics landed her in jail, where she was, sort of, scared straight. Weaver's tale of addiction and semi-madness is neither new nor insightful. Rather it is a voyeur's delight: Weaver gives salacious moment-by-moment details of dropping E and snorting coke. Those who loved James Frey's manufactured addiction memoir can get a new fix here. Like Frey, Weaver just "decided" to stop being an addict and ruining her life. As she declares, "When I tell people this ... they always think there should be something more. ..." Weaver is right: There should be something more, but she lacks insight. In the end she remains the poor little rich girl, no longer drunk, drugged and disorderly, yet nevertheless, lost.

Victoria A. Brownworth teaches writing and film at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her most recent book is "The Golden Age of Lesbian Erotica: 1920-1940."

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