"I told my parents, who were for some reason shocked and amazed, that I was a drug addict. They had thought I was simply a thief, and not a very good one.
I didn’t tell them that I had no intention of abandoning my best boyfriend, the relentless pimp-slapping love of my life; I only wanted to get well enough so I could go back to him in better shape.
So I made another crash landing, through the financial grace of my parents, this time into a treatment center smack in the middle of lake-splotched, mosquito-buzzing Minnesota summer. By this point, I had completely ceased to think of men as human. They were functions that could either confer on me the popularity, Glamour, and status that I so dearly needed, or withhold it. And even more relevant at that time, they could either facilitate my getting high or they could interfere with it, getting high having replaced the need for social anything-at-all."

"Like so many other kids gone wrong from my time, place, and class, I thought it was glamorous to be self-destructive. Unfortunately, I had always known that this was a stupid and callow way to think. I knew that self-destruction was a vile method of slumming; I knew that there were people who got destroyed whether they wanted to on not. Here was Glory, beloved baby girl of professional parents, going into neighborhoods her great-grandfather had worked all his life to get out of, sniffing around for heroin, the opiate of the people. Marie Antoinette in her little peasant dress, Glory in her leather jacket. I knew all this, and yet I couldn’t stop."