Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Memoirs

MY FAIR JUNKIE

Amy Dresner

A Memoir of Getting Dirty and Staying Clean

In the tradition of books like Orange is the New Black and Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight, MY FAIR JUNKIE is a biting, incredibly funny and way-too-honest debut memoir about Amy Dresner’s twenty year battle with sex, drugs and alcohol addictions.

Growing up in Beverly Hills, Amy Dresner had it all: a top-notch private school education, the most expensive summer camps, and even a weekly clothing allowance. But at 24, she started dabbling in meth in San Francisco and unleashed a fiendish addiction monster. Soon, if you could snort it, smoke it, or have sex with, she did. Smart and charming, with Daddy's money to fall back on, she sort of managed to keep it all together. But on Christmas Eve 2011 all of that changed when, high on Oxycontin, she stupidly "brandished" a bread knife on her husband and was promptly arrested for "felony domestic violence with a deadly weapon." Within months, she found herself in the psych ward--and then penniless, divorced, and looking at 240 hours of court-ordered community service. For two years, assigned to a Hollywood Boulevard "chain gang," she swept up syringes (and worse) as she bounced from rehabs to halfway houses, all while struggling with sobriety, sex addiction, and starting over in her forties. In the tradition of Orange Is the New Black and Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight, Amy Dresner's My Fair Junkie is an insightful, darkly funny, and shamelessly honest memoir of one woman's battle with all forms of addiction, hitting rock bottom, and forging a path to a life worth living. Amy has been the sole columnist for the online addiction and recovery magazine TheFix.com for almost four years, and has written over 45 articles for them. They regularly receive between 800k and 1,000,000 hits per month with readers all over the world. It is the premiere, most popular and edgiest online magazine for addiction/recovery. Amy recently started freelancing for the Good Men Project which averages 10 million page views a month. Her work has been reposted by Salon and retweeted by the late New York Times media columnist David Carr. Amy has also been a regular contributor to Addiction.com. PsychologyToday.com recently gave Amy her own addiction blog entitled “Coming Clean.” As a writer, she is influential and controversial enough to have been invited onto the site without a Ph.D.

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Book Published 2017-09-12 by Hachette

Comments

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.

Fascinating. Uncomfortable—“spout wise words from the podium” then sport-fuck newcomers trying to make yourself feel better. 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.

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.

Amy Dresner's My Fair Junkie is, honestly, 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.

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.

Dresner's book is a sickening masterpiece. Hilarious and raw, she cuts to bony truth. I love her!