STASH

A memoir of addiction, attempted recovery, and hitting bottom.

“My parents were hippies who, despite their African American heritage, had done the very Scandinavian thing of continuing to parent me after their divorce,” writes Robbins, who rebelled by beginning a love affair with an Oakland pimp and drug dealer who introduced her to smoking freebase cocaine. Though she liked it, she eventually quit. “To me,” she writes, “the world was divided into two categories of people: failures, aka folks who were stupid enough to let other people see that they needed help, and successes, aka self-reliants like me, who would die before they accepted help from anyone.” Later, after marrying a TV star and working as a publicist, enjoying life as a “young, interracial power couple,” the author discovered that she merely traded one addiction for the more genteel one of reliance on Ambien. Soon, she was seeking drugs among different doctors and pharmacists, lying to others and herself about her condition, and enduring cycles of feast (when a prescription is refilled) and famine (when the bottle is empty). Sometimes, Robbins hits just the right note—e.g., “being high—really high—is like being completely submerged in viscous fluid.” However, the back and forth of repeated scamming attempts, rationalizations, cold sweats, evasions, therapy sessions in rehab, and negotiations over an eventual divorce takes on a certain numbing sameness after a while. Ultimately, falling in with a fellow addict (“Four DUIs….You would think that anyone with four DUIs would be dead or in prison”) and committing to rehab broke the cycle. Although the story turns toward at least the possibility of a happy ending, the author is aware that it can all come crashing down in an instant. “We’re doing the best we can with what we have, and sometimes that has to be enough,” she concludes.

Breaks little new ground, but a solid cautionary tale about the dangers of drug addiction and the struggle to overcome it.