Amid headlines of overdoses and galloping addiction rates, Carlyn Zwarenstein’s memoir is an outspoken and provocative dispatch from the New Age of Opium
North Americans are the world’s most compulsive and prolific users of legal opioids. Author Carlyn Zwarenstein, diagnosed with an inflammatory spine disease as a young mother, eventually turned to them to manage her pain. In her lyrical update of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, she recounts her search for relief and release — with its euphoric ups, hallucinatory lows and desperate pharmacy visits.
Along the way Carlyn traces the long tradition of opium’s influence on culture and imagination, from De Quincey to Frida Kahlo. Part love letter to Romanticism, part critique of modern medicine, Zwarenstein’s memoir offers a distinctly different riff on pain, creativity and mind-altering drugs.
Over the past eight years I have regularly been asked to rate various aspects of my pain—along with fatigue and resulting psychological distress—according to those one-to-ten scales. (On one such scale—there are many—ten represents unbearable, unimaginable suffering, the sort that would quickly cause one to black out; one represents no pain: “feeling perfectly normal.”) It’s a frustrating exercise. Both mental and physical pain are difficult to quantify.
[Mental and physical pain] are best expressed in metaphors: the dark hole, the cliff, the vise, the hot poker, the black dogs. Or in ambiguous phrases evoking the senses: heavy, fine and needle-like, wide or very bright. Loud and metallic. Electric. Soft and creeping. Or more like concrete, like lead, like spiders.
The Wounded Deer, 1946 by Frida Kahlo
“In 1946 Frida Kahlo had an operation on her spine in New York.
She was hoping this surgery would free her from the severe back pain but it failed.
This painting expressed her disappointment towards the operation.”
Jade Colbert writes, in her review of Opium Eater: The New Confessions, that “Zwarenstein achieves that rare thing: a dispassionate account informed by deeply personal experience. Readers will benefit from this measured look at the causes of our increased dependence, which doubles as a critical memoir on the relationship between opioids, creativity, and pain.”
We speak with Carlyn Zwarenstein.
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audio | @CarlynZwaren #OpiumEater @Nonvella #CanLit #opioids #pain #drsbookclub #peoplefirstradio #chly | LISTEN: https://t.co/BTaUtBIFfl pic.twitter.com/cbBcskVCBu
— People First Radio (@peoplefirstrad) January 20, 2017
About Carlyn Zwarenstein
I live in Toronto, spend time in Mexico City, and write about a lot of different things, in particular, medicine, literature, travel, social justice, and landscapes of the mind. I also do plain language and medical copy-writing & editing, and am a long-time freelance journalist.
Next up: a strange and marvelous (well, here’s hoping) novel inspired by a real-life massacre of students in 1968 Mexico–transformed and transposed to a divided, unreal Toronto. In further non-fiction, a collection of illustrated (not by me, silly) essays on how things–all kinds of things–feel. And non-fiction that considers the vexed & intimate (not that kind of intimate!) relationship between doctors & patients and the equally vexed and intimate processes of immunity and infection. And some other stuff. Too much to do, too little time.
I’m on Twitter and you can follow me at @CarlynZwaren. Slightly longer writing-related news, links and musings go on Facebook.
