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    Permanent Midnight: A Memoir (20th Anniversary Edition)
    Permanent Midnight: A Memoir (20th Anniversary Edition)
    Permanent Midnight: A Memoir (20th Anniversary Edition)
    Audiobook11 hours

    Permanent Midnight: A Memoir (20th Anniversary Edition)

    Written by Jerry Stahl and Nic Sheff

    Narrated by Jerry Stahl and Scott Merriman

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    “An extraordinary accomplishment. . . . A remarkable book that will be of great value to people who feel isolated, alienated and overwhelmed by the circumstances of their lives.”—Hubert Selby, Jr., author of Last Exit to Brooklyn

    “[Stahl] is a better-than-Burroughs virtuoso.”—Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker

    “Original, appalling, indelible picture of a man trying to swim and drown at the same time. Stahl has nerve, heart, a language of his own and a ghastly, riotous humor.”—Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life

    “Permanent Midnight is one of the most harrowing and toughest accounts ever written in this century about what it means to be a junkie in America, making Burroughs look dated and Kerouac appear as the nose-thumbing adolescent he was.”—Booklist

    A searing confessional infused with the darkest humor, Permanent Midnight chronicles the opiated abyss of a Hollywood screenwriter and his formidable climb into sobriety.

    Made into a major motion picture starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, Permanent Midnight is revered by critics and an ever-growing cult of devoted readers as one of the most compelling contemporary memoirs.

    Music © 2015 by Joe Cardamone

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateSep 3, 2019
    ISBN9781721356102
    Permanent Midnight: A Memoir (20th Anniversary Edition)
    Author

    Jerry Stahl

    Jerry Stahl is the author of six books, including the memoir Permanent Midnight (made into a movie with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson) and the novels I, Fatty and Pain Killers. Formerly the culture columnist for Details, Stahl's fiction and journalism have appeared in Esquire, the New York Times, and the Believer, among other places. He has worked extensively in film and television and, most recently, wrote Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, for HBO.

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    Reviews for Permanent Midnight

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    • 3/5
      Nope. I didn't read the whole thing so you always want to take that kind of a review with a big grain of salt. However even if it was groundbreaking for its time it's self-consciously self-conscious. It's like everything is kind of like the druggie unhappy version of a cute little girl's smile that has been practiced so many times that even when it's sincere it seems saccharine sweet. And talking about your ziplock balls in the first paragraph of the book after especially after I two page forward by your number one admirer he wants nothing more than to be exactly like you and thinks you are the greatest writer known to man or pretty close to it is just a little bit too much of the me me me song for my taste. If you are trying to have ironic humor and strike that sort of Rye self-deprecating sarcastic cool attitude about the awful stuff you've been through then you probably shouldn't go for it that graphically and focused on your genitals in the first paragraph. Yes saying that you are wearing depends because you're in detox and that a man's most important jewels AKA his scrotum (for our society, anyway) has been damaged and all due to a drug habit does bring home with all the intensity the author intended that he has hit rock bottom. Even if that Rock Bottom turns out later to be a cardboard bottom two stories above the real Rock bottom. I don't know because that kind of self-conscious overly in your face crude sort of intimacy with a new reader just strikes me as a pretty blunt tool. And it's not very interesting frankly. If everything has to be written in the cultural language of the college frat boy or ex frat boy or something like that I just can't get into his head and his heart the way you would want to. I like ironic humor and I like people who tell it like it is no matter how rough and graphic and sad it is. But the gratuitous stuff and the overly self-conscious self-aware look at me and look how honest and crudely honest and sadly Frank I can be just distracts me and irritates me. So the writing may be grand and maybe I'll read it another time to find out and come back and write an apologetic follow up but I don't think I'm going to apologize for disliking the opener. Especially in view of it being described as a great work. But I was never that impressed by some riders that are in my mind overrated because they were different. Being a little fresh and inventive is never a bad thing but that can't be all you have. And if you're going to tell a wider audience about your trials and suffering and ultimate Triumph you probably don't want to start with their face between your legs nose buried in your ziplock AKA suture scrotum inside a pair of Depends tight enough to make your waist hurt. Not for me anyway!