Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir is the memoir of punk musician and performance artist Lisa Crystal Carver, published by Soft Skull Press in the US in 2005 and by Snowbooks in the UK in 2006.
The book covers her life from ages 18 to 32. [1] It relates her childhood growing up with her volatile ex-convict father, and her running away at 19 to enter into a troubled marriage to French performance artist Costes. The book also details her relationships with Smog's Bill Callahan and with industrial-music provocateur Boyd Rice, with whom she had her son Wolfgang.
Drugs are Nice is adapted in part from Carver's diaries. She workshopped the book at a critique group she called the "Meat and Books Club" (named for the Atkins diet two of its writers were on). [2] The chapters about her relationship with Rice, where Carver writes that Rice insisted she get an abortion to end her second pregnancy and was violent toward her, [3] were difficult for her to write. She told the Boston Phoenix that she "had to get drunk every day" to write them. In lieu of a traditional book tour, Carver re-enacted a few anecdotes from the book live, including a suicide attempt with a potato peeler and a quick "make-out session" with GG Allin. [4]
The book was released alongside an hour-long DVD, Drugs Are Nice: A Suckumentary 1988-2005. It contained film shorts, footage of her band Suckdog, and avant-garde operas that she and Costes had put on. [1]
The Village Voice , reviewing the memoir, called it "an amazing elegy for the lost underground of the ’80s." [5] It was also praised by Billboard , Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly . [6] [7] [8]
Lisa Crystal Carver, also known as Lisa Suckdog, is an American writer known for her writing in Rollerderby. Through her interviews, she introduced the work of Vaginal Davis, Dame Darcy, Cindy Dall, Boyd Rice, Costes, Nick Zedd, GG Allin, and Liz Armstrong to the public. A collection of notable articles from the zine was published as Rollerderby: The Book.
Darcy Megan Stanger, better known by the pen name Dame Darcy, is an alternative cartoonist, fine artist, musician, cabaret performer, and animator/filmmaker. Her "Neo-Victorian" comic book series Meat Cake was published by Fantagraphics Books from 1993–2008. The Meat Cake Bible compilation was released in June 2016 and nominated for The Eisner Award July 2017. Vegan Love: Dating and Partnering for the Cruelty-Free Gal, with Fashion, Makeup & Wedding Tips, written by Maya Gottfried and illustrated by Dame Darcy, was the Silver Medalist winners of the Independent Publisher Book Awards in 2018.
Jean-Louis Costes is a French noise musician, performance artist and film actor. Costes has been described as the French version of GG Allin, though unlike Allin's rudimentary brand of hardcore punk, Costes' music is largely synth-driven, relying heavily on looped beats, overmodulated vocals, and random outbursts of screaming and glitch fills.
Suckdog was an American underground band. The core members were the married couple Lisa Crystal Carver and Jean-Louis Costes. Suckdog toured the continental United States for several years with "Suckdog Circus," performing a mix of wrestling, musical performances, film screenings, and general audience agitation. The heart of the Suckdog Circus were the noise music "operas" written by Costes and Carver which involved strange experimental fantasy stories with much blood and sex.
Celia Diana Savile Imrie is an English actress and author. She is best known for her film roles, including the Bridget Jones film series, Calendar Girls (2003), Nanny McPhee (2005), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011), The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015), The English dub of The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales... (2017), Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018), Malevolent (2018) and for the FX TV series Better Things (2016-2022).
Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer and author of nine books, including A Complicated Kindness (2004), All My Puny Sorrows (2014), and Women Talking (2018). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award for her body of work. Toews is also a three-time finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a two-time winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
Ann K. Powers is an American writer and popular music critic. She is a music critic for NPR and a contributor at the Los Angeles Times, where she was previously chief pop critic. She has also written for other publications, such as The New York Times, Blender and The Village Voice. Powers is the author of Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America, a memoir; Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black & White, Body and Soul in American Music, on eroticism in American pop music; and Piece by Piece, co-authored with Tori Amos.
Walk the Line is a 2005 American biographical drama film directed by James Mangold. The screenplay, written by Mangold and Gill Dennis, is based on two autobiographies by the American singer-songwriter Johnny Cash: Man in Black: His Own Story in His Own Words (1975) and Cash: The Autobiography (1997). The film follows Cash's early life, his romance with the singer June Carter, his ascent in the country music scene, and his drug addiction. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as Cash, Reese Witherspoon as Carter, Ginnifer Goodwin as Cash's first wife Vivian Liberto, and Robert Patrick as Cash's father.
Roya Hakakian is an Iranian American Jewish journalist, lecturer, and writer. Born in Iran, she came to the United States as a refugee and is now a naturalized citizen. She is the author of several books, including an acclaimed memoir in English called Journey from the Land of No (Crown), Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove/Atlantic), and A Beginner's Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious (Knopf).
Ben Is Dead was a Los Angeles-based zine published from 1988 through 1999. Its creator, Deborah "Darby" Romeo, got its name from a dream she had about her husband Ben, a Frenchman she divorced not long into the magazine's run. Romeo would later write that during the magazine's early days Ben found the title amusing, and would introduce himself to people as "Ben, from Ben is Dead."
Kelley Deal is an American musician and singer. She has been the lead guitarist and co-vocalist of the alternative rock band the Breeders since 1992, and has formed her own side-projects with bands such as R. Ring and the Kelley Deal 6000. She is the identical twin sister of the musician Kim Deal.
Rebecca Lynn Cardon is a film and television actress, personal trainer, and product spokesperson.
Michael Patrick MacDonald is an Irish American activist against crime and violence.He is also an author of the bestselling memoir. In his memoir, All Souls: A Family Story From Southie, MacDonald combines his traumatic past experiences with his passion for the anti-violence movement to build a coalition with the Boston's gun-buyback program enlisting the survivors and organizers.They then gear their one voice towards transforming traumatic experience into a voice becaming the founder of the South Boston Vigil group. A local community that works to honor Southie's victims of gun violence.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her Licence de lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Minka Dumonte Kelly is an American actress, model and philanthropist. She rose to fame for her role as Lyla Garrity on the NBC drama series Friday Night Lights (2006–2009). In 2011, Kelly starred in the films The Roommate and Searching for Sonny and had a recurring role as Gaby on NBC's family drama series Parenthood (2010–2011) and a main role as Eve French in the revival of ABC's action series Charlie's Angels (2011). Kelly portrayed Dawn Granger / Dove on the first three seasons of the DC Universe/Max superhero series Titans (2018–2021).
Liz Prince is an American comics creator, noted for her sketchbook-style autobiographical comics. Prince initially started publishing on her own on the internet and later became a published author with Top Shelf Comics. She currently lives in Maine.
Clara Callan is a novel by Canadian writer Richard B. Wright, published in 2001. It is the story of a woman in her thirties living in Ontario during the 1930s and is written in epistolary form, utilizing letters and journal entries to tell the story. The protagonist, Clara, faces the struggles of being a single woman in a rural community in the early 20th century. The novel won the Governor General's Award in English fiction category, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Trillium Book Award.
Meredith Maran is an American author, book critic, and journalist. She has published twelve nonfiction books, several of them San Francisco Chronicle best-sellers, and a successful first novel. She writes features, essays, and reviews for People, More, Good Housekeeping, Salon.com, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe.
Sy Montgomery is an American naturalist, author and scriptwriter who writes for children as well as adults.
Clea Simon is an American writer. She is the author of World Enough, a psychological suspense thriller set in the Boston music scene, and the Blackie and Care, Theda Krakow, Dulcie Schwartz, Pru Marlowe, and Witch Cats of Cambridge cozy feline mysteries. Her non-fiction books include Madhouse: Growing Up in the Shadow of Mentally Ill Siblings, Fatherless Daughters and Feline Mystique: On the Mysterious Connection between Women and Cats.