Lead Poisoning: A Memoir

I like getting high. There, I said it. For four decades, I've chased that rush—first through Black Sabbath blasting in my suburban bedroom, then through the sticky floors of CBGB's, the needle-littered streets of the Lower East Side, and the beer-soaked dive bars of Seattle. Music was my first drug, but it wouldn't be my last. Shame is like lead poisoning—one childhood brush with contamination and it's in your blood forever, warping every cell, every choice, every desperate grab at love through whatever chemical or flesh promises escape. This is my story. From the suffocating Jersey suburbs to cooking by candlelight in Mexico, this memoir rips through seven incarnations: Hater, Poseur, Junkie, Wife, Mother, Widow, Woman. Each identity both armor and albatross as I ricocheted between rock shows and corporate law firms, between shooting dope with the music scene's darker denizens and shooting the shit at PTA meetings. This isn't some recovery redemption nonsense. It's about getting called a poseur in every scene you try to claim—too clean for the junkies, too dirty for the squares. It's about outgrowing trauma without pretending it didn't happen, about finding real love after decades of thinking abuse was passion. Raw, darkly funny, and brutally honest, Lead Poisoning is for anyone who's ever felt like an outsider in their own life, who's lost themselves in the pursuit of belonging, who knows that sometimes the only way to survive your past is to burn it all down and start over.