High lives /low lives: Women's narratives of drug addiction

High Lives/Low Lives: Women's Narratives of Drug Addiction addresses the recurrent cultural erasure of white, middle-class women's illicit drug use through reading the life stories that female addicts and recovering addicts produce at moments when the figure of the white, middle-class female addict becomes particularly visible. Mapping the historical and social circumstances of women's stories of addiction, each chapter reveals patterns of social change that render the white, middle-class female addict visible. I argue that when these women become visible as drug addicts, they engage with popular medicalized discourses of addiction to construct life stories that earn them cultural audibility, authority, and redemption. Chapter One explores the first published voice of drug-addicted women in American literature, O.W's No Bed of Roses: The Diary of a Lost Soul (1930). Focusing on the treatment that O.W. receives at the hands of emergent addiction specialists in the early 1920s, I argue that O.W. embodies the paradigmatically paradoxical conception of the white, middle-class female addict as innocently ill, inherently deviant, and intentionally criminal. Chapter Two explores Martha Morrison's struggle to accept her addiction as a "disease" over which she has no control in her twelve-step autobiography, White Rabbit A Doctor's Own Story of Addiction, Survival, and Recovery (1989). White Rabbit reveals the disease concept as mechanism by which middle-class privilege and heteronormativity are maintained. Chapter Three examines Susan Gordon Lydon's use of the 1980s and 90s feminist reconceptualization of psychological trauma to construct her drug addiction as a symptom of her traumatic past in Take the Long Way Home: Memoirs of a Survivor (1993); I evaluate the effectiveness of trauma as a feminist framework for representing women's addiction. Chapter Four analyzes two 2005 Oprah shows, "Will She Choose Life or Death? An Oprah Show Intervention," and the follow-up, "The 17-year-old Meth Addict: Did She Quit?" Oproh's therapeutic discourse relies on the current prevalence of pathology as a norm and reinscribes addicted women as blamelessly "sick" White, middle-class addicted women face a cultural imperative to tell their stories in exchange for therapeutic "help" and cultural redemption. I ask what must they say to be heard?