More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction

Less, Later, Stop

Oh, sure it's too easy a target, a...book ("book" seems rather too noble a sentiment here) about Ritalin addiction, dedicated to Bruce Springsteen, which contains statements like, "[m]y favorite activity is sitting under the incandescent light in the bathroom and tweezing hair out of my legs," and sure More, Now, Again (the title! that god-awful, nails-down-a-chalkboard title, ensuring the sheer loathsomeness of the enterprise) is me-obsessed, solipsistic to the max, crass, craven, shrill, annoying, incoherent, illogical, profoundly unreflective, self-justifying, attitudinal, reductive in the way that all bad entertainment is, and is full of bad thinking and really, really bad sentences (random example: "I pour some vanilla bubbles into the hot water in the tub, I watch the tawny gel swirl under the faucet, and I climb in"), but — but — it is also a fascinating artifact from a particularly terrible moment in American history. A moment which is now, let us be thankful for small mercies, OVER. Not that the author seems to be aware that she herself is history. Well, not that the author is aware of much of anything, in fact, except for her own rude-grrrl irresistibility. (How do we know she's irresistible? Well, we'll just have to take her word for it.) As the horrible year that was fades away, let's say a little prayer that More, Now, Again is the final belch from a glutted decade. Amen.

Adrienne Miller is Esquire's literary editor.

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