How to Stop Time

Author Essay

One of the Village Voice Literary Supplement’s top 25 books of 1999

"A very impressive book, all the more so because of its remarkable calm and restraint after such a terrifying experience." –Penelope Fitzgerald

"Ann Marlowe is a meticulous encyclopedist of the pharmocopeia, a stone-cold dissector fo youth’s follies, a relentless moral essayist and a secret poet. Her book burns as it goes down one’s craw, and it keeps burning in memory." –Luc Sante

"With fierce clarity and an unflinching grasp of paradox, Ann Marlowe sets a new standard for bullshit detection. This keen, elegant and haunting book will become a classic." –Jonathan Lethem

"How to Stop Time is the little black dress of dope books. Smart, sleek, and savagely subtle, Ms. Marlowe is the most gifted druggie to pop out of Harvard since the late Timothy Leary." –Jerry Stahl

"There are people bound to misread this book and see it as dangerous because of its cool authority, its lack of hysteria, because it’s not a victim’s book or a story of "survival" or destruction. It’s simply a memoir and a guide — unlike any I’ve ever read. Pro-drug it is not, but very moral it is." –Bret Easton Ellis