With his nickname, Dirty Jersey, tattooed on the inside of his left forearm, James Salant wanted everyone to know he was a tough guy.At the age of eighteen, after one too many run-ins with the cops for drug possession, he left his upper-middle-class home in Princeton, New Jersey, for a stint at a rehab facility in Riverside, California. Instead of getting clean, he spent his year there shooting crystal meth and living as a petty criminal among not-so-petty ones until a near psychot...

At age 14, Lori Stephens was thrown out into the streets by her mother. This was the beginning of a life no one deserves to endure, ever.Through her struggle to stay alive, in a world she barely understood. Lori survived the next 30 years of drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness, rape, domestic violence, assault, conflict with the Law and jail. See how she was forced to resort to physical violence to stay alive.How she escaped with the courage and the will to stay alive,...

A gripping and compelling story of one mothers journey raising her heroin addicted daughter.On the night of August 22, 2009, her beloved 32-year old daughter died from heroin overdose.Despite all the sorrow, this story is neither gloomy nor depressing, but rather an unflinching account of one woman's life, and her daughter whom she did not abandon to the bitter end.

Julie grew up in the heart of Dublin’s north inner city, in Sheriff Street. Living in this tough area, she was exposed to crime and drugs. She started using heroin when she was 16. By the time she was 18 she was a chronic addict. This story details how she spent the next four years living on the streets of Dublin; dealing drugs and stealing to feed her habit. It is a snapshot of how a young girl became a victim of circumstances. It happened in Dublin, but it could have happened anywhere in...

In his follow-up to his bestselling memoir Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines, Nic Sheff reveals a brutally honest account of a young person's struggles with relapse and rehab.In his bestselling memoir Tweak, Nic Sheff took readers on an emotionally gripping roller-coaster ride through his days as an addict. In this powerful follow-up about his continued efforts to stay clean, Nic writes candidly about eye-opening stays at rehab centers, devast...

Just two hours ago, I had been heating up some lentil soup at my mom’s in Brooklyn, thinking I’d eat it and maybe read some Edith Wharton before bed. Now here I was at a runaway shelter, staring at a nun’s mustache and wondering where I was going to spend the rest of my adolescence.At fifteen, sick of her mom’s spineless reactions to abusive men–and afraid of her stepfather’s unpredictable behavior–Janice Erlbaum walked out of her family’s apartment and never returned. What followe...

Elizabeth Wurtzel published her memoir of depression, Prozac Nation, to astonishing literary acclaim. A cultural phenomenon by age twenty-six, she had fame, money, respect—everything she had always wanted except that one, true thing: happiness.For all of her professional success, Wurtzel felt like a failure. She had lost friends and lovers, every magazine job she'd held, and way too much weight. She couldn't write, and her second book was past due. But whe...

Even though Oren Elow had never tried heroin, hed always heard that it was a gift from the goddess. So he didnt hesitate to try it when his buddies offered him his first hit of heroina hit that would make him a heroin slave and one that would define so many of his following years. In this memoir, Elow shares his lifes narrativefrom growing up in Louisiana with an alcoholic father and loving mother who later divorced, to his years on Bostons streets as a heroin addict, to his time spent beh...

The story that inspired the major motion picture Beautiful Boy featuring Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet.**This New York Times bestselling upper young adult memoir of a young man’s addiction to methamphetamine tells a raw, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful tale of the road from relapse to recovery.Nic Sheff was drunk for the first time at age eleven. In the years that followed, he would regularly smoke pot, do cocaine ...

Born in a small railroad city in the far corner of Northern Vermont on a bitter cold January day, Cora and her twin sister were births number twelve and thirteen to an already over populated family that was suffering from poverty, mental, verbal, manipulation and incest abuse.At a very young age Cora learned how to become extremely loyal to disloyalpeople in herlife. Feeling like she was always a shadow behind her twin sister, Cora grew up feeling like she did not exist even though...

Auna Raunea was just two years old when her father threatened to stuff her in a potato sack and throw it in the river. It was only the beginning of what would be a twenty-one year journey through hellat the hands of a man she should have been able to trust implicitly. The Innocent and the Merciless is the true story of how a little girl lost not only her purity, but also her childhood, to a father intent on sexually abusing and emotionally torturing his own blood. Forced to sleep on a bare...

Rachael Keogh was catapulted into the public consciousness when a shocking image of her needle-ravaged arms – skin burnt from injecting heroin into her wasted veins – made front pages around the country. Desperate for help, she made a public appeal to secure one of just 27 detox beds in Ireland so that she could reclaim her life from the drugs that had consumed it. What followed was an extraordinary story of grit and determination as she embarked on her recovery journey. Dying to Survive i...