White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin

by Michael W. Clune

A classic of addiction and recovery.

How do you describe an addiction in which your drug of choice creates a hole in your memory, a “white out,” so that every time you use it is the first time—new, fascinating, vivid? Michael W. Clune’s story takes us straight inside such an addiction—what he calls “the memory disease.”

With dark humor, and in crystalline prose, Clune’s account of life inside the heroin underground reads like no other. Whisking us between the halves of his precarious double life—between the streets of Baltimore and the college classroom, where Clune is a graduate student teaching literature—we spiral along with him as he approaches rock from nodding off in a row house with a one-armed junkie and a murderous religious freak to having his life threatened in a Chicago jail while facing a felony possession charge.

After his descent into addiction, we follow Clune through detox, treatment, and finally into recovery as he returns to his childhood home, where the memory disease and his heroin-induced white out begin to fade. White Out is more than a memoir. It is a rigorous investigation that offers clarity, hope, and even beauty to anyone who wants to understand the disease or its cure. This tenth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Addiction, Biography, Mental Illness, Drugs, Biography Memoir

269 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2013

About the author

Michael Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. His academic books include A Defense of Judgment, Writing Against Time, and American Literature and the Free Market. Clune’s work has appeared in venues ranging from Harper’s Magazine, Salon, and Granta to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PMLA, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has been recognized by fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and others. He is currently the Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Also writes as Michael Clune .

Reviews

[Brian McLaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why is everyone treating this like it's a self-help book or scientific study of addiction rather than a valuable work of 21st-century literature?

[Kevin Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ⭐️

One of the better written memoirs I’ve ever read. Michael Clune is a terrific writer who has an inflection in his writing that I loved. Most memoirs are read because of the topic(s) being discussed but I would read more by him. Especially a novel. If this topic of heroin addiction and recovery were written by a lesser writer, I would’ve stopped reading it. I don’t know if this is a just term to use but his writing is addictive. I finished it in a day and a half and would definitely recommend.

[John Treat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clune gets it. He really gets it. This memoir comes from the place addiction really comes from, which is to say the loving and hateful relationship so many of us had/have with heroin. The danger of this book, as least for the addict-reader, is that it reminds us of the high so well we risk desiring it all over again. Recommend this book to friends in recovery only very, very carefully.

[Georgia Cloepfil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything came back to me. The holy question of “who am I?” was hard to sustain. It was hard to pretend I was some great mystery when every puddle and every slant of light knew me.

“I know you” said the evening chill, “you were the pirate in the school play.”

“I know you,” said the sunset, “your bedtime was at eight.”

“I know you,” said the puddle. “When you were little, I showed you a bit of the sky.”

Now the sky, the puddle had something new to show me. The reflected bit of sky showed me… Me. I looked at the puddle and my heart sank, full of 10,000 days.

[Kevin Keegan · Rating 4 out of 5]

“So if you ever see a junkie gazing lovingly at a needle or a vial of dope, it’s not like a miser looking at his money or a voyeur staring at porn. The vial of dope you see isn’t there for the junkie. To him, it’s a little pane of clear glass, and he’s watching his first time through it. It’s the most personal thing in the world. It’s not like a voyeur staring at a picture of nameless naked bodies. It’s like a prisoner looking at a photo of his family.”

[Amar Pai · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ehhhh.... too self-consciously Poetic. Not much happens as junkie memoirs go.

[Max Mcgrath · Rating 3 out of 5]

Made going to oberlin sound way cooler than it is

[Romany Arrowsmith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel extraordinarily lucky whenever I pick up a book about a harrowing, rare human event that was experienced by someone with a writer's eye for observation and detail. Addiction memoirs, like war memoirs, all have the same shape - all! I'm confident in that assertion. But the best ones can push in texture and color and give that familiar shape new meaning.

Regardless of its high literary merit and non self-helpiness, I read this at the right time. The pandemic has forced me out of my habits, my habits which constitute my identity, my identity which is totally and only the absence of the addiction that came before the habits. Isolation has given me too much blank space to try and fill with old vices. But: don't put it in, and it won't get in you.

[Kirsten · Rating 3 out of 5]

[2013] A slow burn of a book. No big, splashy moments, just the steady journey into addiction and out the other side. Jumped around in time, a little hard for me to follow but that didn't detract. Took a while to get to the point but that was okay, too. I think describing something like heroin addiction to someone who hasn't experienced it must be incredibly difficult and he does a good job. Mostly straight storytelling, dipping into a little more stream of consciousness for some of the heroin experience/withdrawal parts. That worked.

[Tao · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://muumuuhouse.com/mwc1.html

[Micah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book a lot because it was entertaining and because it opened up new ways for me to think about addiction, which is to say from the point of view of the addict.

[Olivia Liang · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've really struggled with my review and rating for this one, mainly because I found the preface and epilogue to be the most compelling parts of the book. What a baffling situation...

I bought this memoir because the first few pages were written with such a blunt and well-crafted voice that I immediately thought: this is brilliant writing that feels fresh, tense, and raw; I will gladly tune in for 260 pages.

But then I was confronted with a different narrator: Clune in his addiction years, staying relentlessly situated in his life as a junkie in Baltimore and Chicago with no layering of future retrospection. The main chapters of the book are so in-the-moment, so loyal to the addict's perspective. But it was SOBER Clune, future Clune, who pulled me in with his well-crafted criticism and intelligence and perspective! He was the narrator I wanted to learn from and listen to, and I was very disappointed that he only reappeared at the very end.

To a certain extent, it's unfair to judge a book for what it is not. The truth is, I wanted a very different book. And my true gripe is a personal problem: even though the writing felt very sophisticated and well-crafted throughout, I didn't like the story for the same reason I don't like having conversations with people when they're drunk or high. Listening to their meanderings and drunk logic and obsessions and bad choices feels arduous, wasteful, and unentertaining. Again, I do think the writing was quite brilliant, but I really wish it was current-day Clune's voice and perspective walking us through his past life versus giving addict Clune the reins.

My true rating is a 3.5, but I'm going to change to 3 stars (from an original 4) because I reserve 4 stars for titles that I would recommend to anybody, regardless of taste. For this book, I'm telling people that the preface is by far the highlight; continue if you wish.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slightly conflicting feelings. I think it was a valuable perspective to learn and I am glad I read it but there are a lot of things that he talked about doing and saying (sober and not sober) that really bothered me and he just kind of brushed over every one as if that was just the way everything needed to happen. I liked the preface though

[Eamonpw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Soooo many perfectly perceived sensations and states of being captured in metaphors that felt honest. I suppose metaphor is essential to the entire operation of recovering sensations and things from one's experiences and successfully conveying them to others with less or no experience of such things.

[mo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Left a huge impression on me

[Tom Buchanan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What Hitler books? Yeah, right." This book is really funny!

[Sonja · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t usually love books about drug addiction but this one felt different. It was very vulnerable and poetic, and offered a lot of insightful commentary on how we treat addiction. I loved it!

[claudia r]

i thought the blurb on the back of this book, comparing michael clune’s heroin addiction memoir to james joyce was silly (“james joyce as a junkie in modern-day baltimore,” it says). but it is, truly, joycean, in the actual and mundane sense, not in the i-read-ulysses-with-my-boys sense. it is digressive, gross, funny, nonsensical, and ever so slightly sentimental...

also, clune is an oberlin grad just like i am, and though i did not get addicted to heroin on a roof there in 1997 (i was 1.5 years old), the place still holds a special memory loop “white top” in my brain…

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was absolutely stunning. Best book I’ve read all year, up there with AHWSG and In The Dream House for me in terms of formally inventive and just stellar memoir. I was thinking about a fiction writer friend who complained that his workshop peers were more interested in documenting the intensity of an emotional experience than in plot. This is that—documenting the intensity of the emotional experience of addiction. But it’s so gripping—the voice just hooks you, the shifty drug logic, the way time distorts and collapses, these super visceral scenes of abject rock bottom addiction, soaring, palpable highs, and most movingly for me, the depiction of humanness as it comes back online during recovery. It reminded me of The Recovering in that sense: a book interested in portraying sobriety as it is, complicated and boring and hard-won and worth it. Funny, all the blurbs & comments saying this is a cut above other addiction memoirs as if addiction memoir is a dirty word and not a genre dedicated to wrestling with a really important reality of our time. But also I get it because the intensity of reading this is so unique and transporting that I felt almost high reading it. A smart and really beautiful book.

[Lottie Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best memoirs I have ever read. A shapeshifting momentary book. Authentic and tragic, poetic and often disturbing. Michael Clune’s White Out is more than a memoir, instead a lost literary masterpiece.

Out of time, out of sync with the world and out of control, Clune details his battle with heroin addiction and the worlds in which he existed but did not live. Baltimore, Chicago, Michigan, Florida…Tiger, Henry, Dom, Eva…it all melts into one poisoned memory.

Clune recites the same conclusion to his suffering ‘The Memory Disease’, the looping and shifting struggle between past, present, future. Things that happened, things that didn’t, things happening and things forgotten. Muddled but beautiful, his prose is a conductor against a raging and sometimes violent orchestra of memory.

The lack of any plot is essential in the understanding of the addiction itself. Clune weaves through time collecting anecdotes that open up into wide open spaces - moments that tell us histories.

An astounding book, compelling even in its quietest moments. A dream-like read from a brilliant, once in a generation, writer.

[Nikolai Nikiforov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Книга тематически пересекается с литературоведческой книгой того же автора, вышедшей чуть позже, так что не вполне ясно: то ли он Китса и Пруста укладывает в схему, которая ему открылась в героиновых откровениях, то ли героиновые откровения приводит к "академическому" виду. Понятно, что первого должно быть куда больше, но видится, что и без второго не обошлось. Книга очень жуткая, интересная и смешная, по-моему, Клюн "из глубин" извлек философические переживания, ценные независимо от наркотиков. Trainspotting знаю только фильм, но юмор тут похожий — чуть туповатый, но очень смешной. Отдельная глава посвящена роли мирового коммунизма и лично Ленина-Сталина в деле реабилитации торчков.

[Henry Koelling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Clune is a really good writer. I couldn't help but think about his privilege and how lucky he was throughout his journey of becoming addicted and getting rehabilitated.

His accounts of addiction are insightful and really had me thinking. Since moving to New York I've given a lot of thought to how I can help members of my community who struggle with addiction. This book by no means offers solutions but it allowed me to do some important thinking.

[Jenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the way this was written was difficult at times, overall it was one of the better memoirs I've read regarding addiction and recovery. However, it wasn't the best, although I'm not sure what it was lacking.

[Frances Whited · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this author's voice and the way in which he provided a glimpse into the thought processes of an addictive personality.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Proust meets Jesus' Son. That sounds about right. A bit long, but a great addiction memoir.

[camilo · Rating 5 out of 5]

a very gritty and hard hitting work with stark and inhabiting prose

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very powerful and well written look at addictions.

[Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What about my bright future?” I asked myself. “The future lasts forever,” I answered."

White Out is memoir about the author's heroin addiction and the many ways in which the drug impacts your mind. He emphasizes the way heroin corrupts your sense of time and memory- he calls it the memory disease. Grappling with this idea- his experience of newness every time he uses, the way the rest of his life and responsibilities wash away in the whiteness of time, the way that time warps and not all seconds are created equally- felt like the core of his story.

"But humans have certain, almost invisible adaptations to this world. We’re made for these minutes and seconds and seasons. We’re sensitive to differences that don’t seem to matter, and are hard to describe. The human body has a grip on this world. The white body, the white eye, the white mind: It just doesn’t have the same grip."

It feels to me that this is the metaphysical destruction of himself (obviously setting aside the physical dependency and withdrawal). His memories- the pieces of his life that build to form "him"- are white'd out in the bliss and chase. His time is lost and found, erasing and re-writing seconds from the past.

"The dope molecules carry information to the brain’s memory glands, where time is manufactured. At every instant the addict inhabits at least two times at once: the first time he did it and the next time he will do it."

"Catching all those human memories—in the sunsets, in the smell of cooking, in an old book I found under my bed—that was hard. And being back in human time, knowing that I would eventually die, that was hard too. But even worse was having to get a job."

This was a tough read in the sense that he describes a painful and sad time in his life but it is also tough in the sense that it is difficult to fully to understand his perspective. The way he writes is so compulsively readable but then you get to the end of the page and you have to read it 3 more times.

"From that distance my hand and the faucet looked about the same. The way houses look from outer space. Black dots on black dots. Which one is yours? Where had I traveled, to get that distance from myself? And did part of me stay behind, to notice how strange it all was? What was left of me when I changed? Where did it stay? And if nothing was left, then how could I even tell I was different? You see what I mean."

^no not really

"Once you know that marvelous white immortality, there is no place, no image, and no face in your past or your future that doesn’t turn toward it. A beautiful girl or boy, a pleasant beach, a lovely building: A distant glory glows around those shapes. Their far side faces the white sun."

Addiction seems truly, incomprehensibly terrible and relentlessly unfair. I found the banal way he writes about some of these stories to be really telling - he talks about dangerous, gross and painful situations like theyre just another day... clearly thats the point. He was existing on multiple planes, on multiple timelines- one where he is experiencing the high for the first time on his friend's roof, and simultaneously one where the food in his fridge is rotting and he's randomly bleeding outside his sister's apartment.

"Any old lady who takes OxyContin for two weeks will develop a dependence and suffer some withdrawal symptoms. When the doctor takes her off it, she’ll feel like she has a mild flu for a couple days, then she’ll forget about it. Unless it got into her memory. Then she’ll go to doctor after doctor after doctor getting scripts. Then one day the pharmacies will put it together and she’ll be cut off. Then she’ll make her way, through seven or eight different contacts, each one a little lower, to Dominic’s, where I’ll meet her."

I appreciated the humor he was able to mix in- it really helped sometimes.
"But there was no place like Baltimore in the late nineties. Everyone knew everyone. You felt like you could walk in any door and find someone who was selling what you wanted. There were beautiful parks. There were liquor stores and ice cream trucks. There were no Nazis. It was my kind of city. Well, there was one Nazi. “I’m a Nazi, Mike,” Funboy admitted"

"I remember my dentist, the regular one, the one with the soft hands, saying once when I had a root canal that he didn’t prescribe opiates because he’d read somewhere that they didn’t remove the pain. They just made it so the pain didn’t matter. That dentist understood nothing. It’s like saying there’s no point in flying to Florida to escape the winter, because it’s still winter in the place you left."

“Beer sucks,” Henry said. “You gotta be a fucking retard to be an alcoholic.” “No shit,” said Dom immediately."

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, disturbing, vividly authentic

It takes a lot of courage to write a book like this and a lot of confidence in your writing ability. Clune does write well and he gives away a lot of himself in this mesmerizing memoir about the descent into heroin addiction and recovery. He calls heroin addiction an addiction caused by memory. Strange. But reading the book I think I understand what he means.

When I was child and then a “tweener” long before the word entered the language I was fascinated with heroin addiction. It seemed to my childhood self standing in a liquor store or drugstore reading comic books that the very idea that something could be so addictive, so demanding that you would do anything to have it including killing say your mother was just unbelievable. I would sneak looks at the cover of “Confidential” magazine, a green sheet about all the bad things people did, murder, rape, drugs. As the years went by I read books and saw movies on addiction, heroin addiction. I recall “The Man with the Golden Arm” starring Frank Sinatra. Today they talk about scaring somebody straight. In my case I was pre-terrified. And I’m the kind of guy who does not like even the thought of putting a needle into my arm or neck, as one of the guys, Henry or Dom, in Clune’s memoir does.

The central metaphor of this memoir is white. Heroin is white, there’s a white light that reminds Clune of heroin. It shines a lot when he isn’t high and looking to cop. The frig is white. It reminds him of heroin. The light coming in under the door is white. It reminds him of heroin. The white around the irises of his girlfriend’s eyes reminds him of heroin. It’s the memory of heroin that keeps him hooked. The first time. The white out white light of the first time.

The strange thing about Clune’s memory is that it is so good about everything before he kicked. After that it is less intense, less specific.

In a way this is about being twentysomething and lost. Lost in the white light of the world. Clune is an academic today, an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve. Reading between the lines you can see that he is a personable guy, smart and devious. He knows how to talk his way into and out of situations. He’s very talented. His writing is creative, original and it glues you to the page. He comes across as honest and open. But you know from all the things he did to score that he is capable of much dishonesty and concealment. But in the final analysis as I finished the book I thought he was okay, that he was just like some of the guys I knew when I was in my twenties, but a bit smarter, a bit more privileged, probably better looking, somehow strong and likable.

Anyway there’s nothing I can say that will come close to bringing to life this disturbing yet ultimately redeeming memoir. Just read it.

—Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”

[Alyssa Storm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Soooo this book took me an incredibly hot second to finish due to my reading habits slowly diminishing but we are coming back strong. I had Michael Clune as an English professor last semester and curiosity got a hold of me! For a little context, this is an autobiography following his recovery from heroin addiction and gave me an incredibly new and important outlook on addiction from a first person pov. Lets just say his quirky and funny personality definitely did translate onto the pages and I give it 4/5 stars for a few reasons that I shall discuss below. Enjoy. Also I like dont use grammar rules or anything when writing reviews and let the words flow so sorry if some sentences just quite literally make no sense! :)

The emotional potency of the novel was incredibly breathtaking and, simultaneously, done in a way that I have never experienced before. It truly felt that he put onto the page what he felt, in the words he wished to use, without the fear of being misunderstood. This is something that I appreciate so MUCH. I feel like a lot of writers fall into the constructs of how things SHOULD be written, on how feelings SHOULD be detailed and percieved, but I think through the ways he broke these constructs he also breached the capacity to which feelings portrayed could be felt and understood. I literally dont know if that makes any sense but... yeah!

Alongside this emotional rawness was a story that really made you kind of understand how it was to be in his shoes. Especially with the rhetoric around addiction being a moral failing (which I dont belive, but some do), I think that this type of storytelling is so important and really made me recognize that this can happen to anyone. I also love the almost philosophical undertones of all the stories and ~lessons~ I guess you could say. I learned a lot :)

The only critique that is perhaps keeping this at 4 stars is sometimes I got lost in the plot and perhaps the meaning of the stories that were being told. perhaps a little mumble jumbled. AND while I did on one hand love the uniqueness of his writing style, it did at times make me a wee bit lost. This could TOTALLY be only a me thing, and I think that this is perhaps the risk you take with certain styles? But that is what keeps it from being a 5 star story for me.

Overall, would recommend this book to a friend and think it is an important story and a smart way to spend your time, I feel like I have gained a lot of perspective and knowledge from reading it.