Mike Doughty comes clean about heroin addiction in new memoir
Enigmatic songwriter reads from his book and performs at Eddie's Attic this Saturday
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Mike Doughty loves drugs. Now let's be clear: He doesn't do them anymore. Hasn't in years, and kicking his various habits was a long struggle — but he's the first to tell you he wouldn't trade a day of his past, winding through his stint with Soul Coughing to various new solo projects. His just-released memoir, "The Book of Drugs," pulls the curtain back on this enigmatic songwriting gem and reveals a Doughty many people may not recognize. It's an often uncomfortable though delightful read, in the sense of what you might expect from one’s detailing their own heavy drug use. Doughty is open about everything: his upbringing, his family, and his stinging accounts of his past and present hatred for Soul Coughing. “If somebody says they love Soul Coughing, I hear fuck you,” he writes. It's not a juicy, gossip-laden tell-all, but rather a simple account of one man's coming to terms with a perfectly imperfect life. That’s the Doughty way, as it stands now both in the book and accompanying live release, The Question Jar Show (in which Doughty answers fans questions dropped in a jar on stage): open, honest, comfortable and — perhaps the biggest change — content.
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Mike Doughty (book reading and performance). $20-$23. 8 p.m. Sat., Feb 4. Eddie’s Attic, 515-B North McDonough St. 404-377-4976. www.eddiesattic.com.
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So I guess the obvious question is, why now? Why was this the time to write “The Book of Drugs?”
MD: It wasn’t really pre-meditated. I was working with a manager who asked if I had ever thought about writing something, and it just kind of fell into place as it should.
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Was there a particular story, or particular detail, that you found most challenging to write?
It was really hard writing about my parents and my younger brother, but it was something I couldn’t leave out. At some point, I had to decide ‘am I going to write this for real, or am I going to give it somewhat of a gloss?’ And what I’m best at is real. So that’s what I chose. It was super important to show myself as a flawed human being, because there’s so much stuff about other people that’s pretty harsh, so I felt this obligation to dig into my own things and take out the ugly ooze and put it on display.
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Define addiction.
Addiction is something that’s fucking you up that you can’t stop doing. There’s some hint of pleasure in it, or maybe there’s a great quantity of pleasure in it (laughs). You’re sitting there going ‘I don’t want to get high,’ and suddenly you’re high. ‘I don’t wanna waste $10,000 at the casino,’ and so on and so forth (laughs). I guess there is such a thing as physical addiction, as in anybody can do a shit ton of cocaine and have a physical addiction to cocaine, but what it is to be an addict to me is a very, very deep element of your identity, and it’s something you struggle with in almost every behavior in life.
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What about “will power?”
I don’t know, man (laughs). All I know is that it wasn’t will power that got me clean. It was shutting up and listening to the people whose lives I found I really attractive. It’s much more efficient to let go, in almost all things.
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Is fame an addiction? And do you think your drug use in any way tied to wanting more fame, even if you didn’t know it at the time?