Complicating Our Narratives About Addiction and Illness: The Millions Interviews Amy Long
I first met Amy Long through a writers’ networking group where she often answered questions with extreme thoughtfulness and generosity. We became friends, and Long was kind enough to give me an advance copy of her memoir, Codependence. Long’s book is a fearless look at opioid addiction. It sheds light on chronic pain, the opioid epidemic, romantic codependence mixed up with substance abuse—all through a stunning combination of experimental techniques and traditional essays. Long and I sat down to chat recently, and the conversation was just as frank and thoughtful as her new essay collection.
The Millions: First, I’d like to talk about the form of the book. Some of it is experimental, taking the visual formatting of a doctor’s prescription, or a reference book entry about a drug; some is straightforward. What made you decide to employ the experimental format? In what ways do you feel your writing differs in the two formats?
The book mostly started as a medicine cabinet I made as a final project in ‘s creative nonfiction workshop at Virginia Tech. The library’s graphic designers helped me make all this cool stuff—I rolled up stories in pill bottles and bags of, a printmaker and visual artist, made me this insanely cool map to use in it; you can see it on my Instagram and in the book—felt like the best way to write about the trouble I always had filling my prescriptions and how discourse about opioid abuse affects my ability to take them for chronic pain. The glossary essay felt necessary in that I’d hear people in workshop say, like, “Well, she is on opioids. Maybe she’s hallucinating,” and I realized I couldn’t expect everyone to have the same prodigious drug history I do! I also wanted to catalog all the non-opioid medications I’d tried (most of which are also represented in the medicine cabinet), and they fit nicely into that form. I never wanted the formal experimentation to feel gimmicky, and while I like the generative nature of those kinds of constraints, it was also nice to sort of spread out in the more traditional essays.
