When people write about their experiences as drug addicts they often — wittingly or not — write with a degree of competitiveness. There is a tacit understanding that the reader will feel cheated by anything less than a full-blown addiction to class-A drugs. A handful of Solpadeine and two bottles of vodka every day for 20 years just isn’t going to cut it with a publisher. James Frey was well aware of this when he embellished A Million Little Pieces to make it more ‘appealing’, and how right he was: we lapped it up.
Readers want the author of a sin-soaked drug memoir to lie, cheat and steal — preferably from his/her middle-class parents. Any of the following are recommended as extras: prostitution, sleeping on the street, mugging an elderly pedestrian. Relationships should suffer (if not implode) and ideally a large fortune should be reduced to a big fat zero. When the author has sunk to an appropriate level (i.e., low enough for the reader to pity rather than envy him/her) a redemption is allowed to occur. With the help of a long-standing partner, whose sympathy and understanding are recognised in the Acknowledgements section, the drugs are put aside. A farm in Gloucestershire might be the next step: chickens, a pig, a laptop computer and a publishing deal.
Bearing this fantastical template in mind, it is perhaps not so curious to find Veronica, a fiction, more credible than autobiography.
Alison meets Veronica in Manhattan in the Eighties, but she tells the story of their relationship as its only survivor, 20 years later. Alison was a model when she met Veronica, at 21, and now she cleans a friend’s office, lives in a grimy suburb beside a filthy canal, takes codeine all day and tries to stay on top of her health — she has Hepatitis C.
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