Memoir is the New Fiction

Lisa Crystal Carver is everything most of us don't have the balls to be. If you are cooler than me, you know her as one of the members of Suckdog, a 90s post-punk band/performance group/whatever. She was the second person to put out a zine in the States (she disputes rumours that she was the first) and now she is a successful freelance writer.

The daughter of a drug addict, the ex-wife of an abusive neo-Nazi, and the mother of a boy with a chromosomal deficiency, Lisa Crystal Carver is also the author of the most entertaining and intelligent memoir I have ever read. Drugs Are Nice: A Post Punk Memoir was published in 2005 by Soft Skull Press. Beginning with the genesis of Suckdog (called "the most interesting band in the world" by England's Melody Maker), Carver takes us on a tour of the 90s sub-culture fringes that she helped create.

Carver manages to balance humour and tragedy without brevity or sentiment or that false child-like light-heartedness that seems to infect so many contemporary memoirs written by folks under 40. She doesn't bitch about her rich, neglectful parents or evil boarding school chums. She writes about dark, off-the-hook people with compassion and humour and the stuff that she has lived through is about one million times more interesting than anything you'd catch in a Clinton memoir.

Reading Carver made me want to be a better woman. It inspired a desire to be more brave, more wild, more loving and less judgemental. You will not want to put this book down and when you are done, you will be sad.