See you in September.

September means back to school for some, and back to complete insanity for others. I fell into a bit of a void this month and took a little sabbatical from blogging. Here's what I was doing instead.

1. Wrangling writers at Kingston WritersFest.

Highlights: Deborah Ellis, who is so down to earth and passionate and generally awesome. Also, Iain Reid, a local boy made good, whose new memoir One Bird's Choice is so, so funny. I interviewed him for Kingstonist and he did not hate my questions--success! Oh, and I shared an elevator with Charlotte Gray, which was nearly as exciting as the time I washed my hands next to Margaret Atwood while she combed her crazy hair.

Lowlights: Nearly breaking Dave Bidini's finger as I tried to shake his hand while he simultaneously did a zombie impression. Also, getting booted out of Chez Piggy due to a fire code violation. At least they let me stay for a bowl of soup.

2. Reading memoirs.

Highlights: As you may recall, I am a huge fan of the genre. Literary agent Bill Clegg's amazing and horrifying Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man bears the ambivalent honour of being a book that really, really made me want to try smoking crack--he makes it sound THAT GOOD. I nearly didn't read it after a close and careful analysis of Clegg's author photo, which put me off for some reason. Something about the three-quarter profile and his teutonic features just reminded me of seventy-five percent of the boys I met in my twenties. I'm so glad I pressed onward. Clegg delves a little too deeply into his own subconscious at times, recalling his childhood compulsion to urinate and trying to tie it vaguely to his adult demons, but you can skip those passages and get right to the good old fashioned crazy stuff. Smoking crack with cabbies after a meeting with your newest author, being refused entry to the W Hotel, stuff like that.

Midlights: Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman. This book is basically the jailhouse version of Eat Pray Love, and there is no sensible reason why I should enjoy it. Usually tales of haute bourgeoisie forced into some humbling life experience tend to piss me off. But Kerman's story of the year she spent in jail for a ten year old drug offense was so compulsively readable and beautifully realized. I've read reviews that call the book reductive, and at times it sure is. She boils down issues of women and criminal justice to pretty simplistic terms and ends the book on a bit of an "isn't it great that I've grown so much and discovered yoga thanks to a Rodney Yee video someone left behind in the prison gym" note. But her portraits of her fellow prisoners and the description of her daily life in the clink are very humanizing and fascinating and darkly entertaining, so I'll allow the lack of a real conclusion for the sake of a pretty decent story overall.

3. Reconnecting with some of my favourite hometown heroes. Welcome home, boys.

Drunk and disorderly.

Last night I read most of Nice Recovery, by Susan Juby. Full disclosure: I am a total addiction/crisis memoir nut, no matter how true or how completely bullshit that memoir might be. I totally bought into the James Frey hype (partly because I loved watching Oprah scold him like a lying child on world television) and I read Mackenzie Phillips' unbelievably twisted memoir in one sitting. I love other people's messes; they make mine seem so much less consequential. So, you know, I went into Juby's memoir of alcoholism and sobriety pretty sure I was going to like it, especially because I absolutely and completely adore all of her previous novels.

I wasn't disappointed. Juby is fucking hilarious. She is ballsy and bitchy and nerdy all at once, and her descriptions of herself as a nervously wild teen girl trying to get in with the bad chicks at school hits so close to home it almost hurts. Example:

"I wasn't completely sure what would constitute a great thing. A lot of beer was a great thing and so was weed. The possibility of getting a boyfriend was perhaps the greatest thing of all. The minute I picked up my first drink I jettisoned childish dreams of becoming a doctor or an astronaut or even a Zamboni driver. Instead I aspired to be like some of the tough older girls I saw who dated men who drove trucks or to be like the lead character in Flashdance."

Leg-warmer purchases and blackout drinking binges soon follow. I especially loved when Juby recounted her move from Smithers, BC, to Toronto, where her drinkin' and druggin' spiral further out of control. She returns home for Christmas determined to show everyone what a sophisticated city lady she's become. You can guess how well that goes. From a scene at the local bar on New Year's:

"We were confronted by the girlfriend of one of the boys one of my friends was sleeping with. Names were called. Threats were uttered. As a fashion design student I felt it was my duty to intervene. ... Next thing I knew I was being carried, none too gently, off the sticky dance floor by a bouncer. He was not swayed by my beauty or the urbanity of my clothing. As I was being dragged past the stage, I saw the musicians glance at each other as they kept playing. Something told me they weren't thinking, "Wow, she must be from Toronto!" "

Rarely do addiction and hilarity go hand in hand, but here they absolutely do. Juby's final descriptions of her recovery from addiction strike the perfect balance between zen acknowledgement and endearing self-awareness, making this book not only entertaining but also pretty feel-good in a non-feel-goody way. I'm a fan. You should be too.