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AS NEEDED FOR PAIN
A Memoir of Addiction
By Dan Peres
SMACKED
A Story of White-Collar Ambition, Addiction, and Tragedy
By Eilene Zimmerman
The addiction memoir may be the most vigorous subgenre spawned by the memoir boom of the 1990s, although the progenitor of the form is Thomas De Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” published in 1821. Many readers, myself included, seem addicted to them, and to the vicarious thrills of intoxication, degradation and redemption. Compared with such hair-raising, train-wreck narratives as Bill Clegg’s “Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man” or Jerry Stahl’s “Permanent Midnight,” Dan Peres’s “As Needed for Pain” is a subdued and civilized narrative, surprisingly short on drama and depravity.
In this instance, the pivotal epiphanic moment in which the junkie discovers true pharmacological love, usually an occasion for literary rapture, passes by like a channel quickly surfed: “I hobbled to the living room, took two more Vicodin, and put on the television. Soon I was feeling no pain. My whole body was warm and relaxed. I felt like I’d been wrapped in an electric blanket.” That’s it. The trauma precipitating this inaugural episode of opiate abuse was not a tortured childhood or a psychological imbalance but a failed cartwheel, performed in the lobby of the Saatchi building in SoHo to impress a trio of young women. Peres is nothing if not self-deprecating, and his description of this event is hilarious. He’d never performed a cartwheel and was by his own admission horribly out of shape. Predictably, he crashes to the floor and seriously injures his back, though he gamely hobbles off to a party. Peres can write; he crafts deft, unshowy sentences and shapely anecdotes. But he’s not great at conveying the exhilaration or the despair of addiction, or the details of the glittering world he inhabited for many years as a reporter for W and, later, as the editor in chief of Details magazine.
It remains a bit of a mystery how the 28-year-old Peres, who was working as a correspondent in Paris, got the head job at a major Condé Nast title, and an even bigger mystery how he kept that job for 15 years. By his own admission, he was largely uninterested in fashion, fitness, night life, music, sex or celebrities other than David Copperfield — the magazine’s staple topics. And soon after he got the job, in 2000, he was zonked on a dose of 60 Vicodins a day. (“Man, that would explain a lot,” a current Condé Nast editor said when I told him the subject of Peres’s memoir.) Peres would seem to be a poster boy for high-functioning addicts, although he describes himself as barely functioning — missing meetings, nodding out at work, spending hours in the offices of five different pain-management doctors to feed his habit. You can’t fault his honesty, although you’ve got to wonder about the judgment of his bosses, including Si Newhouse, the chairman of Condé Nast at the time, and Patrick McCarthy, who occupied the same position at Fairchild Publications, the owner of W.
