How not to live a life
When Thomas de Quincey wrote Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1821, he could not possibly have guessed what he would set in motion. Over two hundred years later, the addiction memoir looks different: less subversive, more sentimental, undeniably more commercial. Since the advent of Alcoholics Anonymous in Akron, Ohio, in 1935, the formula of the recovery memoir now yokes the moral to the medical: alcoholism may be a moral disorder, but it is underwritten by a chemical condition marked by incessant craving — in recovery parlance, an “allergy,” a state of “dis-ease.” For Matt Rowland Hill, the two are inextricably combined. Original Sins is the debut memoir from a writer whose two great loves, “Jesus and heroin,” never quite slip out of one another’s grasp.
