In bad memoirs, the drug arrives like weather. In honest ones, it was already in the house: in the family, in the neighborhood, in the way a young man learned to leave his own body when the room got loud.
Šarašenidze's subtitle names three movements — addiction, prison, the long road home — and refuses to let any of them be decorative. Prison is not a chapter title in italics. It is years. Addiction is not a dark period before the lessons. It is a method of living that worked until it did not, and then kept working as a method of dying.
If you are writing your own account, or reading this one because you recognize the weather, a useful test: does the scene exist to make the reader feel superior, or to make the reader stay? Superiority is cheap. Staying is the art.
The phrase 'lost generation' has been used for writers, for Soviets, for anyone whose timing was bad. Here it is more literal. A generation can be lost to overdose, to the carceral state, to the quiet disappearing of people who still answer the phone but are not, in any usable sense, present.
This book does not argue that every story ends in a kitchen with morning light. It argues that the kitchen is worth walking toward anyway. That is a smaller claim, and a harder one.