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

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

by Amy Dresner (Author)

  • Used

    Paperback 2018

    $3.47
Synopsis

Growing up in Beverly Hills, the only child of a comedy writer and a fashion designer, Amy Dresner believed that everything was always funny and turned out right. And she needed to believe it. If you could snort it, smoke it, shoot it, or have sex with it, she did. It was never her dream to become an Olympic athlete of self-destruction, but that's what happened.

Amy had managed to dodge any real repercussions of her 20-year battle with addiction despite 6 rehabs, 4 psych wards, 3 suicide attempts, and 20 grand mal seizures. But on Christmas Eve of 2011, that all changed. She was high on Oxycontin, in a shitty marriage, and she stupidly pulled a knife on her then husband. She was promptly arrested for felony domestic violence with a deadly weapon.

Within a few months, she found herself in a psych ward, penniless, abandoned by her then husband, and looking at a sentence of 240 grueling hours of community service. For the next two years she would sweep up condoms and syringes on Hollywood Boulevard in the grueling sun as she bounced from various rehabs to halfway houses, all while struggling with sobriety, sex addiction, and starting life over in her 40s.

MY FAIR JUNKIE is the shameless, hilarious, and unfortunately--to Amy--true account of it all. A safari through the wild world of addiction, it's a raucous, inspiring story of redemption, and ultimately an insightful tale of courage and metamorphosis.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 256
 Edition: Reprint
 Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 15 Nov 2018
ISBN 10: 0316430935
ISBN 13: 9780316430937

Media Reviews
I loved this book! Amy Dresner is the real deal; a fiercely funny writer whose insights into addiction and recovery--and life--are full of truth, free of self-pity, sometimes scathing, often poignant, irresistibly page-turning, and painfully hilarious. --Stephen Guirgis, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright
Dresner's book is a sickening masterpiece. Hilarious and raw, she cuts to bony truth. I love her! --Margaret Cho

Mortifying, hilarious, unsparing, and weirdly life-affirming, My Fair Junkie hits the ground screaming and never lets up. As with all great 'drug memoirs, ' the subject of this raw, squirm-fest of an autobiography is not drugs, but what made drugs necessary: the twisted history and relatably depraved torments of the author's own strung-out heart. For fans of Beyond Shame, low-bottom recollectors like Augusten Burroughs and Stephen Elliot, Amy Dresner has earned her spot on the shelf. --Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight
Funny, raw, real, and moving. Amy's memoir digs deep inside the world of addiction and takes you on a ride you'd pay to go on again. Amy, like addiction, is a complicated beast that needs to be unraveled and exposed to understand--and she does just that in My Fair Junkie, an incredible read. --Amber Tozer, author of Sober Stick Figure
The story she tells is hysterically funny at one moment and utterly harrowing the next--and often manages to be both those things at once. --Lawrence Block, New York Times bestselling and award-winning crime novelist, journalist, and author of the short story collection Enough Rope
Hypnotic, magical, mesmerizing. Truly great. Amy Dresner is the most startlingly alert, poetic, stunning writer I have come across in decades. She is a real talent such as one rarely encounters. --Ben Stein, lawyer, economist, actor, and author of How to Ruin Your Financial Life
One of the funniest, most heart wrenching, real, raw, touching, revelatory, and beautiful memoirs I've ever read. It transcends just the addiction lit genre to become something far more universal-something profoundly human-and captivating. I found myself laughing out loud over and over again, while, at the same time, being deeply moved by Dresner's account of addiction to more than just substances, but the need for connection in this increasingly disparate and fractured world. --Nic Sheff, author of Tweak and We All Fall Down
Fascinating. Uncomfortable....This book is a confessional and an indictment. I've loved girls like Amy and they drug my heart through a human sewer of addiction. I've used girls like Amy and I only feigned to care. Why do I find this so fucking attractive? Well-written. Believable. --Jack Grisham, author of An American Demon
Amy Dresner breaks my heart into a million pieces--and then slowly helps me put myself back together again. This is a wonderful book, filled with a frenetic mixture of snappy dialogue and terrifying truth. --Peter Scolari
Dresner, a former stand-up comic and current contributing editor for The Fix, writes about her recovery from drug and alcohol abuse with honesty and irreverent humor. . . . Readers meet Dresner at her worst, but she nevertheless charms throughout her healing. --Publishers Weekly
Effortlessly candid and wryly written chronicle of a life hijacked by drugs, booze, and bad behavior. As a noted West Hollywood stand-up comedian and addiction journalist, she handles this complex tale with wit ... A hard-knocks addiction memoir buoyed with humor and insight.
--Kirkus
In Dresner's unflinchingly honest, graphic, and darkly comedic account of her life as a junkie and the struggle to come clean, readers will find strength in the humanity of those at their lowest. Dresner brings humility, wit, and sensitivity to a topic many readers are unfamiliar with, and those that are will recognize her truths. --Booklist
Like Carrie Fisher's 1987 autobiographical novel, Postcards From the Edge, and Mary Karr's 2009 memoir, Lit, Amy Dresner's story of addiction and recovery, My Fair Junkie: A Memoir of Getting Dirty and Stay Clean (Hachette Books), is one for the ages. --Elle
Dresner's story of drugs, sex and a handful of other addictions is wickedly funny and hauntingly honest. --FASHION magazine

Darkly funny, the memoir reckons with demons--sex addiction, drugs, and the quest for sobriety--in brutally honest, entertaining prose. --Refinery29
Author Bio
Amy Dresner is a former professional stand-up comic, having appeared at The Comedy Store, The Laugh Factory, and The Improv. Since 2012, she has been the sole columnist for the online addiction and recovery magazine TheFix.com. She also recently started freelancing for the Good Men Project and has been a regular contributor to Addiction.com and PsychologyToday.com where she has her own addiction blog entitled Coming Clean and is one of only a select few contributors without a Ph.D. selected to write for the website.