Drugs Are Nice and Lisa Carver is fucking brilliant

Lisa Carver (along with skits and songs by me and Jessy Delfino and others) is reading tonight at 7 at KGB Bar, 85 West 4th Street. She is also on MySpace and her essay "I Was A Teenage Prostitute" is up on Nerve. Add her, and READ HER BOOK.

I finally finished Lisa Carver’s memoir Drugs Are Nice, and it was the kind of book that I either didn’t want it to end, or want to immediately turn it over and start again. Lisa is so, so inspiring, and I think it goes beyond Rollerderby or the counterculture. First of all, she writes in such an immediate, visceral way. She doesn’t look back except a little at the end, but she takes you right there, into the joy and the misery. She doesn’t sugarcoat it, and I think there’s probably a really strong tendency to foreshadow, but she doesn’t. She takes you from her childhood and then weaves everything she told you in the first parts of the book into the latter, because life is chronological like that. At the end, she’s with her best friend Rachel, just like at the beginning, but different. She takes readers on wild adventures in Paris and performance art spaces, through theory high and low, and action. When she writes about putting out Rollerderby, I think any writer will get the thrill of the hunt for the perfect word, for perfection right there in your own hand.

But what makes this book so moving to me is what I look for in anyone I admire, and especially in the memoirs that I treasure and cradle and reread and put in a prominent place, the ones I pick up every time I pass them in a bookstore or see in someone else’s place. Ones like How I Became Hettie Jones, one of my favorite books, and that’s that Lisa practices the art of self-invention. She does NOT accept the fate life has dealt her, does not simply go with the flow and the status quo because it’s expected. Hettie Jones wasn’t even born Hettie Jones; she was born Hettie Cohen, and married LeRoi Jones, who later became Amiri Baraka (and they had Bulletproof Diva author Lisa Jones). Hettie wrote about the struggle, the literal break with her family, one that was painful but necessary, and Lisa does too. Jeannette Walls told me when I met her that memoirs should be universal, and drugs are Nice is, in the best way; it constantly made me think about my own relationships with my family, about how I have and haven’t gone with the status quo. I am not a punk, I never threw anything on stage or did any of the outrageous things Lisa did, but, but, but—I am definitely not who I was groomed to be. In many ways I am a “nice Jewish girl” but I did not follow the path that was set for me. Yes, I went to college, then law school, and then I imploded. Part of me was dying in there, I just felt so laughed at and stupid and wrong, and it’s funny because I think when you finally realize your destiny, it is as easy as Marianne Williamson says. “As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

This was brought back to me dramatically because I got a call from Jessy Delfino, who I recommended to Lisa for a very special, wild performance art piece, and now she’s on tour with her. That made me feel so good, just like I’ve finally found my place in the world, and even if my role is not to write great masterpieces, to write the little things I have been, but to connect people, then I’m okay with that. I like that. I love connecting people. It’s funny because there’s that phrase “it’s all about who you know,” and it’s always said with derision, like that’s a bad thing, like nepotism, and yet, I’ve discovered that “who you know” is important, perhaps all-important…as a starting point. Not as the be-all, end-all, but I’m constantly asked for information about “who I know” and I hadn’t realized that that’s knowledge too. Not the kind you can learn in any grad school classroom, and not the kind that can be sleazily weaseled into with slimy handshakes and business cards. It’s the kind that comes from having a community, a group of people who you trust and who trust you, who value you and you value them. I love helping my friends not just because they’re my friends, but because they’re so fucking brilliant and talented, they are so smart and I’m so proud of them, and it all comes full circle. I like knowing that Jill Soloway and Lily Burana and countless other people all also know how genius Lisa Carver is—and I want everyone to know. Really. Drugs Are Nice made me fall in love with writing again, made me want to seduce and caress words again instead of writing in nice straight lines, instead of being so literal and straightforward. It made me want to write in such a way that you want to lick the words, you want to let them float off your tongue, because Lisa’s do. They explain but they also create and expand language and ideas; she is constantly thinking, appraising, and she never shies away from analyzing herself and those around her. It’s in some ways a bittersweet book, but it’s all the more brilliant for it, because it doesn’t wallow in the horror but walks through it and examines it, all with an eye to the broader picture. Lisa looks at the cooptation of underground culture and her own role, and is self-aware yet also always has more to discover.

I want to surround myself with people like that, who know that they are works-in-progress, who don't settle and who do strive to improve themselves, and most of all, I want to be that kind of person. It doesn't have to mean constant change, but I like movement and action, I get antsy sitting around. I know that I'm as fucked up as anyone else, and for probably the past decade, at least since I started at NYU Law, I've just wallowed in that and thought it was happening to me but I've realized, especially lately, that the power is within me to change, to be different if I don't like myself, to not rely on anyone else's approval or opinion, whether positive or negative, because they can't fill that hole, ever. It'll just be there, still, buried under mounds of external, false approval that can disappear in an instant. I can't believe I get to play Lisa in a skit, I'm very excited, hope I can do that scene justice.

Which means that the person who wrote that she glamorized prostitution in her essay on Nerve needs to read the whole fucking book. Everyone is entitled to their experiences and ideas and reactions and she explores all of that in depth. And when she writes about Rollerderby: “If I feel like throwing something away because it leaves me exposed and ridiculous, if it makes me feel like throwing up, that’s my editorial guide to keep it.” If only we could all be as brave.