About Drugs Are Nice

In 1987 in the small town of Dover, New Hampshire, Lisa and her best friend Rachel--both seventeen--set up a punk show at the Veteran's Hall. When the headlining act got lost and drunk and never showed up, the audience was angry and the promoters hid in the bathroom. Then Lisa got an idea. The girls put on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, mounted the stage, smoked cigars, caterwauled, took off their clothes and hit things and people. Suckdog--called 'the most interesting band in the world' by Melody Maker--was born. Lisa Carver left for Europe at the age of eighteen, quickly becoming a teen publisher (of the fanzines Dirt and Rollerderby), a teen bride (to French performance artist Jean-Louis Costes), and a teen prostitute (turning her first trick a few days before turning 20). Hustler called Rollerderby 'quite possibly the greatest zine ever,' and The Utne Reader chooses Lisa Carver as one of the '100 Visionaries Who Will Change Your Life.' But when her baby was born in 1994 with a chromosomal deletion and his dad --industrial music maven and rumored neo-Nazi Boyd Rice -- became violent, Lisa began to realize the life that needed changing was her own. A story of lasting lightness and surprising gravity, this is a book about the generation that wanted to break every rule. A definitive account of rules broken, left intact and re-written forever, it ripens into the classic account of an artist and a mother becoming an adult on her own terms. For more information, and to read excerpts from the book, visit http://www.drugsarenice.com.

About Lisa Crystal Carver

Lisa Crystal Carver was born in 1968 to a drug dealer father and an English teacher mother. Instead of going to college, she toured the U.S. and Europe six times in the performance art troupe Suckdog. They put out three albums, including "Drugs Are Nice," which Spin called one of the best records of the 90s. Lisa Carver started the magazine Rollerderby, did a short stint as a prostitute, and has written for Newsday, Playboy, Nerve, The Utne Reader, Mademoiselle, Details, and Glamour. Her book Dancing Queen came out in '96 (Henry Holt). She's interviewed Courtney Love, Beck, Lydia Lunch, Sonic Youth, Anton LaVey, GG Allin, and Jon Spencer and was featured on MTV, VH1, HBO, and NPR - most recently on the May 7th 2004 edition of This American Life ("The Way to a Boy's Heart Is Through His Stomach"). more

Praise

'Hunter S Thompson in a miniskirt.' Wired

It's as if Carver is in perpetual twilight, her id chewing away with a superego's logorrhea. 'Often what makes writing great isn't an author's ideas, but the meticulous diagram of her pathologies.' D. Strauss, The New York Observer