I have problems: I am out of clean clothes, I cannot find my glasses, my English paper is late, and my pockets are not big enough for all the heroin I have.
But, honestly, more than anything, I want a cigarette.
This would be a terrific opening line for a novel, but for a memoir—assumed to be an authentic recounting of an actual life in non-fiction format—this opening is painfully problematic. It is one thing to read about fictional people who don’t really exist whining about problems that are of their own making but when a reader opens a work of non-fiction and is instantly greeted by this tone-deaf demonstration of the expectations of privilege, the whole mood instantly sours. The divergence between novel and autobiography has grown increasingly narrower over the course of the last fifty years to the point that some authors join their readers in believing there is no significance difference. The only reason Holden Caulfield can get away with two-hundred pages of self-involved privileged whining about unfairness in the world is because of that divergence between fiction and fact. The narrative voice of this book details the confessions of a deeply flawed individual—in her twenties—who still seems to think it is somehow cool to possess more heroin than she can actually carry. One can only hope that this unpromising beginning is the start of a true story that ends with great redemption.
My first week in jail was a blur…For the first day or two, I alternately slept and snorted the heroin I’d smuggled in. I wasn’t even subtle about it; it absolutely did not occur to me that bringing into a jail could be another felony, or even that it was possible to catch another felony when you were already locked in.
This quote represents the bulk of the first two paragraphs of Chapter Four, thus eliminating any hope that the process of redemption begins quickly. Were this admission to come from a fictional character it would push up hard against one’s suspension of disbelief. Knowing that the character who wrote this did not even stop to think that bringing heroin into a jail would be a crime is an actual real-life person who is relating her actual real-life thoughts is enough to cause severe a severe migraine. At the very least, all readers should be silently wondering to themselves whether it is also possible the author of this book has never watched a movie or seen a TV show set inside a jail. At the far end of this spectrum is another question that a few readers may actually speak out loud: is it really possible this person actually wrote this book? The space between the profound ignorance of the text and the ability to type those words suggests an irreconcilable paradox.
I didn’t even really know what a sheriff did. Despite all my years of drug use, my privilege—as a white woman, as an Ivy League student—had helped shield me from these things.
This is the quote that is the revelation of exactly why this story feels so tone-dead and out of place in a memoir. It all comes down to a matter of privilege. Only it is not white privilege as the writer insists since tens of millions of white people never come close to the privilege she is talking about. She is discussing the privilege of the specific life she lived before her ignominious downfall. It is a life marked by the privilege of spending her youth pursuing the dream of Olympic ice skater. It is a life marked by the privilege required to be accepted into an Ivy League college despite clearly being psychologically prone to self-destructive behavior and remarkably ignorant of even that much of the law which can easily be learned by watching television literally any given day of the year. All these things miraculously disappear in the face of the true color of the privilege which allows a young adult female to be shielded from understanding that bringing heroin into a jail is a crime. It is green privilege as in the color of money.
