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Book Review – My Fair Junkie: A Memoir of Getting Dirty and Staying Clean

Fraser Valley – (Don Lehn with Ann Soutar and Darlene Kobley) –My Fair Junkie: A Memoir of Getting Dirty and Staying Clean by Amy Dresner is one of those books on recovery, that has to dance on a fine line.

There are many books in this genre that are released every year, and the last thing you want to do is be preachy.

Te other challenge is, do you want to be preachy? Funny? Dead serious?

If you want uber serious, I would suggest Nikki Sixx (of Motley Crue) and his “The Heroin Diaries”.

With Ms. Dresner’s book, it is funny, sarcastic, rude and a short easy read. Not to say it’s juvenile. On the opposite, it doesn’t bog down in serious dogma. However, she does take a few shots at the recovery community, so this may not be for someone in early recovery, who is trying to figure out if that is their route be achieving clean and sober. For the recovery novice, it does take a few shots at 12 Step programs and may set off triggers.

But Ms. Dresner doesn’t shy away of the jams she got herself into when she descended into the madness at age 24.

It truly is a 20 year odyssey of sex and drugs and..well, the rock and roll went to the back burner.

Darlene Kobley is well versed in the Fraser Valley recovery community and a guest reviewer. Ms.Kobley read and reviewed the book at the same time as FVN received our media copy:

The 3 R’s we never learned in school….”Raw Raunchy & Raucous”, every page entertaining just like the author Amy Dresner. As difficult as I found to read this book it was an eye opener in many ways. She writes in such a way that you are with her every step of the way and experience each moment with her.

The dimly lit rooms filled with addicts, existing side by side but not connecting and that desperation the comes with this lifestyle literally reaches out and touches you. That excitement of going to a meeting hoping for salvation this time, but finding another distraction… usually a man, once again.

That endless search for something other than self. I needed to put the book down after some chapters as I was overcome with emotion and had to take a break. This is a book that could be put to use in any recovery house or treatment center.

I found myself on every page in some way or another. There is humour in her experiences that only another addict will understand and that descent into personal hell that jumped off every damn page is just as real to this addict.

I thought reading Postcards from the Edge when I sobered up the first time in ’87 was an experience well this book is equally as mind blowing and Amy Dresner’s My Fair Junkie has touched parts of my soul I did not know existed.

My Fair Junkie: A Memoir of Getting Dirty and Staying Clean by Amy Dresner can be purchased through Amazon. Click here to order.

 

 

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