Review
“If you’ve ever wanted to know what an exceptional critical mind looks like on drugs, read White Out. This book is full of enduring insights about time, literature, and memory; it is also a hilarious and scandalous and frightening chronicle of full-blown heroin addiction (and graduate school!). This might be the best book about drugs since [Baudelaire’s] Les Paradis Artificiels.”
―Ben Lerner, The New Yorker, Best Books of the Year
“A poetic memoir of wit and sharp observation, Clune's work reveals the world of a heroin addict . . . Clune’s razor-sharp description of the magical first time he got high exemplifies why this stands out among dime-a-dozen addiction memoirs . . . This chronicle keenly touches on the devastations of heroin with disciplined literary flair.”
―Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“White Out is among the most intense and intellectually thrilling books on opiate addiction . . . [A] decade hasn’t dulled its brilliance: White Out describes addiction’s mortifications with a precision and intensity that shames the prose of not just the average addiction memoir but of contemporary literary nonfiction as a whole. It is ‘about’ addiction in the same sense that Lolita―a key Clune text―is ‘about’ pedophilia: overwhelmingly so, but also incidentally, with the ostensible subject serving as pretext for the play of language and the careful chiselling of a bruised, ironic, complexly self-despising sensibility . . . At once deeply compelling and deeply strange.”
―Daniel Kolitz, The Nation
“White Out is an excellent book―abject, beautiful, funny, profane, truly, truly terrifying―and it made me read Clune’s criticism and essays in a very different light.”
―Merve Emre
“The unusual risk taken by Clune's unusually good addiction memoir is its enduring lyrical reverence for heroin. The heroin is so close you can see the white. It hasn't been relegated to the past. It has an honest and dangerous smile. It's right here, whitely licking its chops.”
―Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker
“A deeply thought-through, reasonable, unified, maybe teachable understanding of memory and self and habit.”
―Tao Lin, The Believer
“His style is direct and confessional, and draws attention to the humour in addiction. He also writes about his theory of addiction . . . The novelty doesn’t come from the feeling of doing the drug, which Clune says ‘starts to suck pretty quickly.' Instead it’s the image, and the persistent newness of the image, that keeps him coming back.”
―Miranda Critchley, London Review of Books
“A memoir that reads like a lost modernist novel―James Joyce as a junkie in modern day Baltimore. James Frey eat your heart out.”
―Adam Wilson, The Millions
“Raw, fresh, and relevant, White Out transcends the recent rash of addiction memoirs to meditate upon addiction as a disease of memory. Like an avalanche in a haunted CandyLand, this book is an onslaught of connections between past and present, between a blizzard of writing and the blank world of terminal addiction.”
―Nancy D. Campbell, PhD, author of Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research
“The best book ever written about drugs.”
―Jordan Castro, Red Scare Podcast
About the Author
Michael W. Clune is Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of Gamelife, Writing Against Time, American Literature and the Free Market, and A Defense of Judgment.
Michael W. Clune
