Nick Johnstone: A Head Full of Blue: A Memoir

By MARGIE THOMSON

For 14-year-old Nick Johnstone, a shy, depressed child from a conventional middle-class family, the discovery of alcohol seemed a saving grace. His love for it was fierce and unquenchable. By the time he was 24 it had nearly killed him. He was bleeding internally, vomiting blood, hallucinating, memory shot to pieces, utterly paranoid. Then he cleaned himself up, met a good woman who loved him unconditionally and wrote a memoir. It's very readable, ghastly of course, but very helpful if you want to understand the obsession, self-destructiveness and lack of self-respect behind addiction.

Alcohol wasn't his only form of self-harm: he also chain-smoked and cut himself. One wonders about the psychology behind memoirs such as this but it's probably a useful communication and, realistically, lacks a completely tidy ending. Cleaning up is hard to do. As they say at AA, one day at a time.

Bloomsbury

$29.95