![]() ![]() ![]() That the point of the book isn't "heroin is bad," though I suppose that's kind of self-evident. At the reading you said you don't think that the role of art is to be moralistic. You’re not going to suddenly be Mr-got-your-shit-together and not have anything to write about. It was more like: ‘you're going to do better work, and you're going to do more work, you're going to get paid more, you're just gonna do better.’ He was telling me all the terrible ideas that he had in sobriety, you know, and made me realise that you’re still going to have bad ideas. I was lucky to find a sponsor who's also an artist – and luckily not in music, so there wasn't too much career comparison. The book paints a pretty linear picture of recovery after, but there’d be times where I’d buy a bunch of cocaine and be like… ‘Maybe I could do cocaine?’ And then my therapist would call and be like ‘No, throw it out.’ So it wasn't like, ‘Now I'm better.’ It was more like, ‘Maybe I could get away with this? Maybe I’ll start drinking?’ It took me about six months to realise that I should probably just do it the way everybody else says you gotta do it: no more drinking, no more this, no more that. The time between was like, I need to make sure I have a therapist, I need to make sure I go to meetings every day, I need to find a sponsor. What was going through your head? Did it take some time or were you immediately like: I have to get this out? Geoff Rickly: It was probably about six months before I started writing. So what happened in the time between travelling home from the clinic in Mexico and beginning to write the book. In short: a work of prose so impressive it prompted best-selling author Chelsea Hodson to set up her own publishing house just to release it, and now serves as a highly disorienting beach read.Īs much as Someone Who Isn't Me is a journey of recovery, it’s ultimately a philosophical exploration of what it means to be a person – of who we really are, and what it takes to survive. It’s part band memoir, part hallucinatory gallop in the footsteps of Dennis Johnson and Jim Carroll (who, incidentally, Rickly saw read at St Mark’s Church in New York as a teenager, seated in an audience that included Allen Ginsberg), and part retelling of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. A river of blood covers the stage at Warped Tour, a swarm of insects are shredded through a car ventilation system, a tour bus hits a horse in the middle of nowhere and paints the road with body parts. The narrator’s own journey to Mexico for ibogaine treatment serves as a prism for self-examination, with “the trip” knocking any kernels of truth sideways into illusion. ![]() It follows a man called Geoff, who sings in a band called Thursday, whose addiction to heroin is imploding his relationship, his friendships and his sense of self – but Rickly deftly detaches his prose from reality. Someone Who Isn't Me is a work of fiction. And most significantly there’s the “white light moment” that led Rickly to a clinic in Mexico to take ibogaine – a naturally occurring psychedelic billed as a promising new treatment for opioid addiction, with serious side effects including fatal arrhythmias. There’s a cameo appearance from Martin Shkreli, the pharma bro whose public trouncing for jacking up the price of Daraprim also revealed him as the financier of Rickly’s label Collect Records. There are bloody-nosed passages about performing with Thursday, a band Rickly fronts whose polarising sound – too clean and lyrical for hardcore fans, too abrasive for everyone else – was largely disparaged in the 00s but nevertheless helped pioneer an entire subculture. Those familiar with Rickly’s career, and the biblically proportioned highs and tragedies contained within, will recognise elements of memoir in the book. ![]()
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