My Fair Junkie: A Memoir of Getting Dirty and Staying Clean

In the tradition of Sarah Hepola's Blackout and Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight, a darkly funny and deeply revealing debut memoir about one woman's twenty-year battle with sex, drugs, and alcohol addiction, and what happens when she finally emerges on the other side--now available in paperback.

Growing up in Beverly Hills, the only child of a comedy writer and a fashion designer, Amy Dresner believed that everything was always funny and turned out right. And she needed to believe it. If you could snort it, smoke it, shoot it, or have sex with it, she did. It was never her dream to become an Olympic athlete of self-destruction, but that's what happened.

Amy had managed to dodge any real repercussions of her 20-year battle with addiction despite 6 rehabs, 4 psych wards, 3 suicide attempts, and 20 grand mal seizures. But on Christmas Eve of 2011, that all changed. She was high on Oxycontin, in a shitty marriage, and she stupidly pulled a knife on her then husband. She was promptly arrested for felony domestic violence with a deadly weapon.

Within a few months, she found herself in a psych ward, penniless, abandoned by her then husband, and looking at a sentence of 240 grueling hours of "community service." For the next two years she would sweep up condoms and syringes on Hollywood Boulevard in the grueling sun as she bounced from various rehabs to halfway houses, all while struggling with sobriety, sex addiction, and starting life over in her 40s.

MY FAIR JUNKIE is the shameless, hilarious, and unfortunately--to Amy--true account of it all. A safari through the wild world of addiction, it's a raucous, inspiring story of redemption, and ultimately an insightful tale of courage and metamorphosis.