Strung Out

One Last Hit and Other Lies that Nearly Killed Me

By: Erin Khar

Narrated by: Jayme Mattler

Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's Summary

“This is a story she needed to tell; and the rest of the country needs to listen.” (New York Times Book Review)

“This vital memoir will change how we look at the opioid crisis and how the media talks about it. A deeply moving and emotional read, Strung out challenges our preconceived ideas of what addiction looks like.” (Stephanie Land, New York Times best-selling author of MaidIn)

This deeply personal and illuminating memoir about her 15-year struggle with heroin, Khar sheds profound light on the opioid crisis and gives a voice to the over two million people in America currently battling with this addiction.

Growing up in LA, Erin Khar hid behind a picture-perfect childhood filled with excellent grades, a popular group of friends and horseback riding. After first experimenting with her grandmother’s expired painkillers, Khar started using heroin when she was thirteen. The drug allowed her to escape from pressures to be perfect and suppress all the heavy feelings she couldn’t understand.

This fiercely honest memoir explores how heroin shaped every aspect of her life for the next 15 years and details the various lies she told herself, and others, about her drug use. With enormous heart and wisdom, she shows how the shame and stigma surrounding addiction, which fuels denial and deceit, is so often what keeps addicts from getting help. There is no one path to recovery, and for Khar, it was in motherhood that she found the inner strength and self-forgiveness to quit heroin and fight for her life.

Strung Out is a life-affirming story of resilience while also a gripping investigation into the psychology of addiction and why people turn to opioids in the first place. 

©2020 Erin Khar (P)2020 HarperAudio

Critic Reviews

"This vital memoir will change how we look at the opioid crisis and how the media talks about it. A deeply moving and emotional read, Strung Out challenges our preconceived ideas of what addiction looks like." (Stephanie Land, New York Times best-selling author of Maid)

Surface material

I found this particular story difficult to relate to due to the author’s self proclaimed life of financial privilege, unwavering familial support and overall sheltered upbringing. It was hard to empathize with her addiction amidst her life of designer handbags, trips to Tuscany, Yoga, sculpture gardens, etc,.. To me, the entire book seemed, to me, too shallow. I would’ve appreciated more insight into her past and less focus on her dating life with California all stars.

Overwhelmed with privilege and narcissism

Overwhelmed with privilege and narcissism seriously hard to finish. I get it everyone wants you and you’ve never had to really work. I was hoping for a feminist recovery story and got an egotistical diary of an adult-child with decent taste in music.

Also the narrator does terrible accents

High Entitlement

As a recovering addict, this book reminds me why I don’t ever watch reality TV

Non-Fiction Bret Easton Ellis (with Punctuation).

At Chapter 3.

I can't recall the last time a book has stabbed me with its caress. This book knew who I was before I opened it, waited for me to find... me. 409 books in my Audible; this is only the 3rd one I've felt compelled to review, and only the first I've paused after just 2¾ chapters to begin my review and catch my breath.

I don't know whether to start with the narrator or the book; they are equally haunting. I'm being seduced and sucked in, by the words, by the voice, by the similarities in our stories. The inescapable compulsion is terrifying, as are the triggers. Read with caution, no matter how much clean time you have, or if you cost not to work a program like me. Yes, there's a genetic link in some cases, but I don't buy the disease model or find salvation in 12-step meetings - if I call myself an Addict every day, and hang out with addicts (sucking on cancer sticks and devouring coffee - also addictions - and I quit both over a decade ago when I stopped going to meetings): I'm (A) Labeling myself into a box for the rest of my life (more on that in a bit), and (B) hanging out with People, Places and Things - basically a freaking Addict orgy. Plus "war stories" from newcomers - which are supposed to remind you how far I've come - can sometimes be triggering... and the white taggers all know where to score, particularly if they're in meetings with court cards and not because they truly WANT to stop.

If I had a tangible copy, I would not be able to put this book down. Yet I've never heard a voice so apropos for the internal monologue of the author. Jamie's voice is a razor with wings. I want to hear every book this narrator has ever read. And I want to read every piece of writing - books, articles, essays, words scrawled on scraps of paper, or mindlessly pulsing in the margins of high school notebooks, on cocktail napkins with fading ink causing little jagged cuts through the top layer, or the bored half-poetry, half-lyrics on the backs of paper place mats waiting for food Erin either won't eat or will devour after days of no food, and most likely countless journals - that Erin has ever written.

She is me, she is not me. Same road on different paths, Late 80s. Her: LA, NY, dreams of Chincoteague, closing her eyes and cantering - fully at peace on a Warmblood (I know that very soon that riding won't be nearly enough to get her to heaven). Good grades - the passport to avoiding authoritative suspicion. Hot amorphous older guy in cold geometric modern home - the shortcut through a gateway that she would've found anyway. Divorced parents with unwelcome hopefully-never-to-be "step" boy/girlfriends. She is water, seamlessly flowing into whomever she has to be depending upon who she's with. On heroin, she's vapor.

Me: Palm Beach, NY, Miami, LA, OC; dreams of Chincoteague, eyes closed cantering on my thoroughbred or loping on my Welsh/QH cross. Endless A-rated shows - MSG, Hampton Classic, etc. English and Western.

Good enough grades enabling me to escape scrutiny - until I got kicked out of private school for possession of weed, mere days before my final exams of Junior year. Transferred to the only public school in the area with - like the private school - lots of famous peoples' children. The very first day of Senior year in homeroom, knowing nobody, the school's undeniably hottest senior guy asked me if I'd ever tried cocaine. I hadn't but I definitely wanted to hang out with him. I said, "Sure." We hung out every single day after that, cutting school mods, to cutting lines around NYC. I became the only girl on the VDT (Varsity Drug Team). I also had Divorced parents, potential "step" assh○les. I too was amoebic - I became whomever the person I was with needed me to (pretend to) be. Cocaine - my own personal Jesus.

I felt a volcano rumbling in my core and had to defuse after the first 2 chapters. I will finish the book, then continue my review.

.... OK: I'm one chapter away from finishing this masterpiece.

Oh Erin; I have so much more to say in this vast ocean of feedback, and I hope you see this review. We are so much the same traveling on different paths. They are parallel, but not identical. I will finish this review tomorrow. Thankfully, now there are so many tomorrows, yet not enough yesterdays.

Ok, it's the tomorrow after a few yesterdays. I listened a second time, this time all the way through without pausing. Somebody in the reviews didn't like this book because it's "superficial," the bedrock of entitlement. Maybe so. But it's Erin's reality, and it's not for someone to judge someone born into opulence, or access to help, parents that stand by them. Yes, her circumstances make her very, very lucky. But addiction does not discriminate. The most amazing and perplexing thing to me is that she was never arrested. LA itself is a facade; a socioeconomic crisis, there's Compton, there's BH. It's a bipolar County, and that's not an insult to bipolar people (like me, BP II, rapid cycling, mixed episodes - before my diagnosis I was terrified by bipolar people. It's comical to a point, but also highly likely I was using too self-medicate).

This is like non-fiction Bret Easton Ellis, with punctuation and realism. This should totally be made into a movie with a tanned Kristen Ritter as Erin. So very "Less Than Zero". Ellis would hate me to say that I prefer the LTZ movie to the book, since he hates the movie, but I think it has a much more realistic ending a la Julian. With 'Strung Out', I can see this as a true bio-pic, but I'm almost not sure that anything can beat the Audible version of this book. The narrator is s master at bringing Erin to life.

I live in Orange County, CA now, by way of all the cities mentioned above starting with Grade/Middle school in NY, and high school(s) in Northern Jersey. Summers at my dad's house in the Hamptons. (Seth and I are from the same tribe. As Andy Cohen might say, "Mazel."). Follow that up with a decade and a half in Miami, graduating UM then working as a manager of a boutique on Lincoln Road, South Beach. Father then moved to Palm Beach from NY.

Then I moved out here to OC in 2008 because that's where all the rehabs are. Orange County has 3% of the population of California and 30% of the rehabs - most are just money machines, with zero attention to actual recovery. The place where I went told young clients to call their parents and lie to them by telling them that they'd relapsed, so the rich parents would pay the $2,000 "Relapse Reinstatement Fee"; then the facility would keep $1500, and allow the young kid to pocket $500. The kids loved it, and the rehab owner sold them drugs. Once one of my housemates found the rehab owner's meth pipe in the seat cushions of the Druggy Buggy (aka white van) that he used to drive us addicts to meetings.

For me, most rehabs were in Southern California or Minnesota - and who wants to live in MN?! I refused to go anywhere without my dogs, and I had to be able to surf (my "Higher Power") - and only one rehab fit both criteria. So I ended up in HuntingtonBeachCostaMesaNewportBeachWestminster.

Funny how that works. My NYC dealers were in Washington Heights, 5 minutes from my school, just over the GWB (it was $3 to cross the bridge back then, but we knew a way to circumvent the the toll altogether). Also 125th, Harlem, and 109th. Hallucinogens were purchased at the Meadow or Strawberry Fields in Central Park. Or last resort, shitty blow from Washington Square Park.

Erin's glam-prog rock scene was equivalent to my rave scene: at 16 - Limelight, Tunnel, Webster Hall, USA, Palladium. Then after-hours clubs in the Alphabet streets.

The West Village was my stomping grounds. I used to fill my days by hanging out with Patricia Field, then eat at Taco Loco, chilling with guys with whom I used to get high and then go skateboard under the Brooklyn Bridge; I was the only girl I knew who skateboarded back then. Back in the Village, I loved skating around Bleeker st., laughing at tourists who pronounced Houston St. as "Hyooston" St. I would sit and watch them, making up stories in my head of who they were. ("that man is a CPA, enjoys golfing often, and had never cheated on his wife. wherever he'd leave for work, his wife would cheat on him with a couple of men - a handyman and a tattooed failed starving artist. The boy with them speaks 2 languages, and is their nephew, with whom they were begrudgingly granted custody as next of kin after her sister, a single mother, died from glioblastoma.") My mind wouldn't turn off, and I made up elaborate stories often because it was fun, sometimes because I was hypomanic. I also hung with a few of the kids in Larry Clark's "Kids", as well as some other kids in his Broward County, FL movie, "Bully." Btw - that "story" was all real. The drugs even at that young age, the lifestyle... he just found kids in the local area and put them in his movies for authenticity. I had a small skateboarding part in "Bully" that was sadly cut. A bunch of my friends are in the movie, just plucked right out of our favorite skate park, and thrown unti a role. (Fun fact: the comic book/arcade shop on Bully was actually a skate shop in Cooper City named Super Skates - and if you look closely, you can see the K2 Skate boxes piled up in the window.) That was a trip.

Back when I was younger, I'd go shopping in NYC for rave mix cassettes at this little outdoor market off W. 4th St. near stores that have been long gone: Antique Boutique, Liquid Sky Design - back when there was pure MDMA (which were called X, while these west coast people call it E). On a tangent, I think that's bizarrely why I LOVE MRIs; they remind me of pulsing techno on the balconies or in LaLaLandia, a room at Limelight. I remember meeting Robin S. there on some rando New Year's Eve where she sang "Show Me Love." Everyone had arguably the first Rave cassette: 'Rave til Dawn' with "Injected with a Poison!" "Obumbrata," "Kiss the Razor's Edge." I was always comped at Limelight; I knew all the secret passageways throughout the club, and Fred Asher knew me. I had a list at the door as they thought I was 21. I was 16.

I loved how when we left the clubs, techno would continue to beat in my mind long after leaving. Going home after 6am; NYC never sleeps, and often we'd find another private invite-only house or other location (Alphabet street time), walking outside the super dark club with its crazy pulsing, dancing colored lights into a whole new world, the blinding sun immediately ruining our high. Here in LA, everything annoyingly shut down at 2am. And even the "cooler" after-parties sucked.

Erin's book brought back a tirade of memories. Good ones, too, like shopping at FAO Schwartz, Think Big, or Dapy - none of which exist anymore. Strung Out makes me want to write again. Reminds me of my days at the MOMA or the Met, sitting on the floor with my sketch book for hours, to see if I could capture the emotion of each painting, fixture or sculpture, which happened occasionally, once in while. Back then I thought I'd be an artist - a decade later, I'd be stupid-high on rails, cutting my coke lines with shaky hands into extremely detailed shapes, like mermaids and seahorses. This seemed EXTREMELY important at the time.

Oh, NYC: the start of all the "fun" before it all got dark ...H&H bagels, Mallowmars (only available when the chilly weather approached in late October, and were removed from shelves when the weather warmed up). Rainbow cookies, black & white cookies, green and pink chocolate-filled leaf shaped cookies from Jewish delis (and there were A LOT of them - not just, like, one Canter's) and giant "pavlovian" pizza causing salivation - when it was in my hand, I had to fold each extra large slice, oil dripping out of the crust as I ate (I never understood the people who took napkins and dabbed the oil off the slice before eating. [Tourists. <insert eye roll>.)]

I remember Orange Julius, Papaya King, overpriced Sabrett hot dogs, salted pretzels, Sardi's, Ferrara's for dessert - I wonder if they're still there. Peter Luger for steaks by way of the wobbly, rickety Williamsburg Bridge, upon which I always held my breath until we were fully crossed over. I also loved the Rainbow Room, Tavern on the Green.

High on LSD and MDMA, my best friend and I stopped at a pet store. All the animals were so, so soft to touch, and colorful; we ended up buying two rabbits, a kitten, a ferret, two parakeets (budgies?) and a fish tank filled with the most colorful fish habitats and florescent gravel, which my college roommate and I stared at for hours under a blacklight. Then we'd be rolling on mescaline, spending 8+ hours of staring at a stucco wall in which we'd see all sorts of moving images. I videotaped that entire trip onto several tapes. My roommate and I both saw a young man cradling a baby; it made my roommate cry; "It's just soooooo, soooo beautiful," she'd say. Yes, so beautiful - 3 hours of videotapes of a plain stucco wall. Side-note: Never go into a movie theater with a patterned carpet dosed on acid. You won't get more than a few feet in without eventually bawling until your stomach wants to burst with unstoppable laughter.

Anyway, Erin's book brought me right back into my young self - a drug-filled stupor that began innocently with both a love and worldly escape from boredom . work . friends into the inevitable throes of self-hatred so identifiable that the book and narrator are visceral. Triggers, almost but not.

I recommend this book to all the of the addicts trying to kick, to remind them that recovery is always available, and always free. I recommend it to all of the people who know a loved one suffering with addiction. I recommend it to anyone who wants to remember the gradual descent from enjoying the most incredible, phenomenal highs with a plethora of friends and constantly going out to parties, having the most unbelievable jobs..... to cutting yourself alone in your room, living in palpable fear, contemplating suicide, completely paranoid and checking the windows repeatedly, leaping out of your skin whenever you'd hear a loud sound or your phone ringing, living on no food but a smoothie now and then, purposely isolating yourself from everything, yet unable to stop using your drug(s) of choice.

I never liked the 12 Steps. Couldn't get over my disgust of all the God references and hypocrisy. Meetings served two purposes: teaching me that as long as I labeled myself as "Addict", that's what I would always be. I could never recover. Yes it's a process, but I was cynical about it being a "disease," because it's the only "disease" that exists that has not wavered or progressed in treatment since its inception in the 1930s by Bill W. or Dr. Bob. I personally believe addiction isn't a disease - it's merely a symptom of a deeper, mental disease for which you're self-medicating. In my case, bipolar II. Which is also really just another label, plucked from the fact that I meet a bunch of the criteria describing the illness as based in the DSM-5. The God/Meetings/Fellowship part is just to give you something to fill the void of no longer filling that hole with drugs. Find a hobby that's healthy - get addicted to that. For me, it was surfing again, and training dogs. Fill that void with something besides the 12-Steps, besides God - unless you want to.

Read the book "The Sober Truth" - statistically, only 5% - 8% of 12-Step program self-proclaimed addicts or alcoholics succeed, and many go out after decades of clean/sober time. Even the genetic aspect doesn't correlate with it being a disease - left-handedness is genetic. Eye Color is genetic, baldness is genetic. A predilection for abusing substances, sex, gambling, etc. is genetic. That doesn't make it a disease. What other illness in the world has not had any advancement in treatments in 80 years?! Things like treating heroin with methadone is baffling. It's just substitution, and I know people who are stuck on methadone even longer. Suboxone can be helpful, yet there's always the emotional despair staring you achingly in the face once the physical pain has gone.

Meetings were for examining the white taggers - the newcomers so fragile that it was easy to get them to relapse so I could meet their connection. That way, I could always find where to score, no matter where in the country I was. Often people relapsed - people who had been been prescribed opiates after an accident, like my friend Adam (sorry about not respecting your anonymity, A, but you were really open about your using...), who worked a solid program for a decade. He even had an MTV show, Gone Too Soon, to help other addicts right before he died. I think he flew too close to the flame, because that show was the first time he'd held a crack pipe in over 10 years and he said he felt super sketchy after that. He was a DJ, with a residency in Vegas, and played at parties of celebrities. He was in a horrific plane accident about a year before he died, and was prescribed opiates for 3rd degree burns he suffered after surviving the intense crash. He also had survivor's guilt - so a double whammy of physical and emotional instability, plus that dastardly show. One day, after 10 years both clean and sober, he barricaded himself in a room in NYC where he used crack and at least 9 oxys, which killed him, in 2009. He was supposed to fly back to the West Coast the very next morning, and then check into a rehab. Drugs are so much fun. Until they're not.

At one 6am meeting at the Alano club in Costa Mesa, when I had many months under my belt, I shared a vulnerability at that moment. After I shared, two other addicts with longer time both went off on me, judging my program, which is a no-no. Rightfully so, as it had me so torn up inside that I left the meeting immediately, drove to Santa Ana and got blow, on which I relapsed after those many months. Sigh. New clean date - again.

After using for awhile again, I was lucky to finally surrender and return to the rooms - where I learned that both of those guys who had judged my program were dead. I also saw many familiar faces relapsing and returning, yet not welcomed back with "no judgment" and open arms like the program proclaims: "The newcomer is the most important person in any room...." After a certain number of relapses, eventually people think that person is hazardous to their own recovery, thus eventually there's shame in returning to the rooms. So there's that.

The Big Book says to welcome the newcomer, but after being a perpetual newcomer, their old program buddies basically gave them a half-hearted clap, a generic "keep coming back, " knowing full well that they'd relapse again - the definition of insanity. And oddly, the people with the most time who stayed religiously im meetings for years were always nuts, the most unhinged addicts in the rooms.

I can't believe how much Strung Out flooded my mind with so many memories. I'll be 45 this year, and I'm still somewhat on that roller coaster, but it's the Children's coaster; I'm nowhere NEAR the extent I used to be. I can hold a job, I can create music and art, I can surf, train dogs, talk to people openly. I can participate in political rallies, marches and protests. I'm on proper meds for my bipolar, and therefore I don't need to self-medicate. Pot's even legal where I am, and shockingly, I just haven't had any interest in it in over 2 years. I can't even remember my last drink, though alcohol was never something I liked anyway. I knew I never wanted kids, but this book made me feel a little empty, at my age, with no partner, wishing for the very first time that I had my own Atticus, that I missed out on the mother thing. But I'd have been a sh!tty mom anyway, I think. My dogs are my world.

I doubt anyone has read my epic of a review. If so, I'm sorry I pissed in your Cheerios with my reminiscing but that's how much this book affected me. I think I just needed to dump, to vent. The only thing I'm curious about is what happened to Gideon and Isabella?

This is hands-down one of my new favorite books. READ THIS BOOK, EVERYONE. Ot better yet, listen with JM's impeccable narration. I just listened to it for the second time without pausing, like a direct flight with no stop-over. In comparison to my life, it's a familiar journey. Maybe not the same DOC, but definitely the same feelings - that familiar pull of being sucked into a mental and physically vacation(?) vortex(?) that I just HAD to take - then I'm both satisfied yet absolutely miserable and empty after I do. There's definite turbulence, but fortunately for Erin, there's a smooth landing. I've definitely still got things to work on, but this book is such an inspiration; it consistently registers with me, and it's a compelling high, with no chance of abcesses. Buy this. 💗

My spirit dopple ganger ?

This book was truely and deeply inspiring. It touched my core, my sole. It gave me hope.

beautiful

I've been sober for 1 year and 3 months. I never thought I'd make it this far. I resignated with Erin in so many ways at several different points in her story. I cried several times. im genuinely happy for her outcome. definitely worth the read. will read again ♡

Excellent

Loved and related to this book so much. Such a good read. I highly recommend it.

excellent

loved it. she puts you there or definitely feeling it. I mean she reads j luck club w/her mom then pawns the jewelry piece related to that time. when she swore to her mom after the abortion situation takes me all the way back when I lied like that. so many scenarios that tells you straight how she'll do it or how she's going to be. oh yea an African American black dealer named whitey!! wow! what she call her baby? baby corspe! I didn't know how to feel about that-corspe baby! damn!! really resonates and im glad I read it! in closing, out of all the information I've seen on a different kind of addict we have now has such a desire to quit! I've read, seen, lived and heard a lot of testimonies.! very good story!

if your in recovery read it

I'm a male who did dope for 12 yrs , it's from a girl's stand point about guys that's the only thing I had to get through , were boys.... and I love women so...but it was a good listen and I related to the mark

Too Naive & Privileged

Sincerity and honesty if less focus on the privileged. Also with having teens why wouldn’t a tuned in mother be aware of addiction pitfalls? It’s as if the writer is somewhat narcissistic as well.

Heartbreakingly good

Such a vivid and honest account of drug addiction and the lost child inside. Beautifully written, gently told. This one will stay with me for a long time I’m sure.