Drugs Are Nice

“Carver’s observations are dead-on and she tackles everything with a sharp, clean honesty. —Chicago Reader

“The 31-year-old married mother from Dover may well be the country’s supreme cultural anthropologist: part literary provocateur, part social analyst. She’s been called everything from this decade’s ultimate underground Renaissance woman to America’s horniest optimist. Hunter S. Thompson in a miniskirt.” —Boston Magazine

“When Newt Gingrich wakes up sweating in the middle of the night with a hard-on and a sense of nameless dread, the face that he sees might be Lisa Carver’s.” —Time Out New York

“With her tart writing and unswerving devotion to lowbrow culture, Carver sound like Camille Paglia channeling both Tonya Harding and Liz Phair.” –Dwight Garner, Details

“Shock-performance artist Carver offers a spunky, well-fashioned memoir devoid of self-pity but heavy on moral-of-the-story hindsight. Carver grew up in Dover, N.H., with a sickly mother, but spent her 15th year with her father in California, when he got out of prison for murder. His hard-knock lessons “shame and shock [her] out of everything [she] knew to be and think,” so that when she returned to Dover, she was transformed and fearless. Meeting “scum-rocker” GG Allin inspired her and a friend to start a “band,” Suckdog, and join the wave of atonal, angry prankster gigs then in vogue (it was the late 1980s). Connected to the DIY underground, a cassette-trading society that eliminates the need for producers, seed money, even talent, Carver met and married French music rebel Jean Louis Costes; together they achieved notoriety with their outlandish performances (one act involved her peeing in a litter box). Other jobs include publishing the early zine Rollerderby, which segues into an infatuation with the troubled neo-Nazi Boyd Rice. Carver had Rice’s child, born genetically disabled, and the family collapsed when Rice revealed himself to be an abusive alcoholic. Carver slides into a chirpy concluding regeneration, while the overall ride of this iconoclast is surprisingly tame. —Publishers Weekly