Being an addict is about the personality–not the chemical of choice. The message is don’t think that rehab is some miracle working kingdom that you can fly off into, every time you screw things up. Every writer wants this–to deliver a message.

Is there a message in your book that you want readers to grasp? These were some of issues I wanted to bring to light with this book. There are all these dysfunctional relationships we as addicts, recklessly plunge ourselves into, just so we aren’t alone. Why addicts most likely use in the first place–not feeling loved, being loved, or accepted (and acceptance is like the cousin of love). It was important for me also, to discuss the one thing people forget is so relevent: human relations and how addicts have so many struggles with this very thing. Then you are rotated down to a phase 2 facility, which closer resembles a homeless shelter or mental ward, and it’s almost impossible not to get tied up in drama in that type of atmosphere. You spend one part (roughly 6 mos.-1 yr.) in a boot-campish phase, rebuilding some type of “value” system, or moral compass, or at very least a little bit of discipline. I also wanted to highlight the differences between private rehabs, and government funded “therapeutic communities,” which are intensive in-pateint therapy facilities. What life is really like the first year sober, and then after the pink cloud dissipates, what is left. I wanted to touch on a different rehab process. They go into a “pink cloud” era–and that’s it right there–no matter what, that’s sure to end. There’s the 30 – 90 days of rehabilitating, the flashbacks to the highs that brought them there, then the part where the rehabilitation happens.

I have read so many recovery & addiction memoirs–and every one ends exactly the same. What inspired you to pen your memoir, Addictarium? Provide a new and different angle, vision, an abstraction–a translation, if you will–of what we call LIFE. All we have left then, are scraps of experiences crumpled up, torn, ripped, beat up–our souls–and, baring those souls to the world. So what does the street kid have? There isn’t college tuition, no mapped out future, no knowing one’s place in the world. No refinemnent, no education, is going to negate that. I’m a street kid, an impoverished wild child at heart, and always will be in certain ways. This is a way to turn my work into a reflection of that. No matter how sloppy or messy, or horrid, or plain out awful some of these things may seem like to other people, to me they are all part of the experience we call life–the experience–the gift, the hell also,–that it is. And, two–to turn my life into a work of art. The inspiration for all of my work, and especially so with Addictarium, is two main things one, first and foremost to tell the truth. What is the driving force behind your choice to become a writer?

Addictarium by Nicole D'Settēmi