How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z

”Heroin,” writes Ann Marlowe, ”is a stand-in, a stopgap, a mask for what we believe is missing. Like the ’objects’ seen by Plato’s man in a cave, dope is the shadow cast by cultural movements we can’t see directly.”Cultural criticism masquerading as a heroin memoir masquerading as a dictionary, how to stop time looks at American society through the lens of heroin use. Weaving personal history (Marlowe used heroin for eight years) with aphorisms and analysis, Ann Marlowe is unsparing in her exploration of her, and society’s, obsession with heroin addiction. There is no glamorization of ’heroin chic,’ nothing about the irresistible power of the drug, no cliched scenes of degradation and ecstasy. There is much about craving the validation of danger, about suburban childhood, about the loss of a father to Parkinson’s disease, about moving to the East Village, musicians’ parties, being cool, and striving to remake yourself.how to stop time is the first book to examine heroin in relation to our cynical, post-consumer society, and the first to explain the profound nostalgia that powers both addiction and our age. ”That drive to return to the past,” Ann Marlowe writes, ”isn’t an innocent one. It’s about stopping your passage to the future. It is a symptom of the fear of death and the love of predictable experience.” Moral but not pious, this book sheds new light not just on nostalgia but on digital culture, consumerism, and glamour. In the annals of addiction literature it will take its place beside William S. Burroughs’s Junkie, Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries, and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater.