The moment Michael Clune realised something needed to change was New Year’s Eve, 2001. He found himself in jail in Chicago, facing prison time for a drug possession charge.
It was there, with heroin withdrawal starting to take hold, that the then 26-year-old had the realisation: he had been here before. Not simply in the sense of having been in jail before (he had) or experiencing gruelling withdrawals, but actually having been in that very jail before. Years earlier, while working as a painter as part of a construction crew, he had painted it.
“And then I found myself in it,” says Clune over breakfast recently near his home in Cleveland, Ohio. He laughs as he thinks about the irony, about how horrible that job had been, before catching himself wondering aloud whether there may have been something prophetic – a warning, perhaps – in it.
Whatever it meant, he realised in that moment that “something’s gotta f***ing change”.
RM Block
Clune, who was born in Dublin in 1975 – and whose memoir White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin (2013) has gathered something of a cult readership – won’t be known to many in Ireland.
We have arranged to meet at a restaurant in the Cleveland Museum of Art, a short drive from where he lives with his wife and daughter. He is tall and affable, not a trace remains of his childhood Dublin accent. It is a few weeks before the launch of his debut novel, Pan, a loosely autobiographical novel about a teenager who uses books and art to help him understand his panic attacks.
Clune’s father, Mike T Clune, was also born in Dublin. His mother, originally from the US, was working as a horse trainer in Ireland when they met. After moving around the southeast of Ireland as his father followed one construction job after another, the family emigrated in the late 1970s and settled in Evanston, a working-class suburb of Chicago. His father later founded a construction company and his mother worked in real estate.
“I had sort of an idyllic childhood,” says Clune of Chicago. He was young enough that the move didn’t disrupt his life massively. While his parents encouraged his education, there weren’t many books at home. In Dublin, though, his grandmother had a house filled with them. Clune grew up associating Ireland with literature – an impression later reinforced when he discovered what he refers to as Ireland’s “glorious tradition” of writers.
The addict sees something in the world that most people don’t see — and that’s a solution
— Clune
His parents divorced when he was 12, and Clune retreated into the world of video games, the subject of his second memoir, Gamelife (2015). Then, at 15, something started happening to him. In school one day, he looked at his hand and began to feel detached from himself and his surroundings before suddenly, inexplicably, he forgot how to breathe.
In June 2002, six months after Clune decided to get clean from heroin, The Wire appeared on television, shocking viewers with its depiction of the poverty, drugs and crime then rampant in Baltimore, Maryland. Clune had moved there three years earlier for a PhD in literature at Johns Hopkins University. Though he would eventually get that PhD, his life took some turns first.
Clune’s years-long battle with heroin is detailed in White Out, which reads like a cerebral subplot from The Wire. The book, commissioned originally to be a companion work to a scientific study on the effects of heroin, is a stunning account of those years, universally praised for the lyrical, dreamily lucid prose with which he describes the drug.
Addiction, says Clune, is a “memory disease”. Unlike other substances or experiences, heroin circumvents the brain’s circuitry. Repetition, he argues, can rob anything – a piece of music, a relationship, a favourite food – of the wonder it first elicits. Heroin was the first thing he had ever encountered that eluded the degradation that time inevitably brings to experience.
People “think the addict’s problem is wanting something that happened a long time ago to come back,” he writes. But that’s not it. “The addict’s problem is that something that happened a long time ago never goes away. To me, the white tops [heroin vials] are still as new and as fresh as the first time. It still is the first time in the white of the white tops. There’s a deep rip in my memory.”
Addiction, he tells me, is horrible, “but the addict nonetheless sees something in the world that most people don’t see – and that’s a solution.”
It was heroin, after all, that put an end to his panic attacks; heroin that provided him the nameless transcendence for which he had been searching. In the end, though, heroin worsened his problems, and gave him more.
“Part of my recovery was understanding that it’s not possible to live my life without some version of that relation to that transcendence in my life,” he says. Writing White Out three years after he got sober was his attempt at turning the drug experience into an aesthetic experience, allowing him to process and possess it.
Quitting was difficult, until it wasn’t. Threatened with jail time, he decided he couldn’t lose any more of his life. Clune initially scoffed at the idea of AA and quitting drinking, but assented. Laughing, he recounts his father’s surprise when he told him that he was quitting drinking. “He looked at me like I was sentenced to life in prison!” Both parents, he tells me, were incredibly supportive of his recovery.
“The struggle to try to use successfully, or to get high and still be alive – that’s impossible,” says Clune, reflecting on the chaos of those years. “It’s super stressful. You wake up every day and it’s like an hourglass. You’ve got four to five hours before the drugs run out and the withdrawals start.”
I ask how he did all this while completing a PhD. He didn’t. “There was no way I would have earned the PhD.” The university had even tried to expel him.
“If I hadn’t been arrested, there’s just no way–” he says, trailing off. “The pull of that stuff is so strong, you need some serious consequences. Some people have them in other ways. They’ll [have] a very serious overdose, [lose] jobs, but oftentimes it does take the law. With the law they’re saying, ‘We’re putting you in jail and you can’t get any drugs while you’re in jail.’ That right there is a stark thing.”
Clune, who has been sober for 23 years, still has moments where he guiltily reflects on his luck. He has lost many friends to heroin; most recently a cousin. Twenty years on he still volunteers his time to help those in recovery.
Like Nick, the protagonist in Pan, Clune had no idea what was happening during his first panic attack. In Pan he describes the moments before a panic attack as a “prophecy” – a deja-vu-like moment of realisation. Soon, though, he had them with such regularity that the hyperventilating, shortness of breath or the sensation that he was “about to come out of [his] own head” became commonplace.
Pan follows a few years in Nick’s life as he navigates his parents’ divorce, falls in love with his classmate Sarah and tries to understand his panic attacks. Reading and listening to music help distract him, temporarily keeping anxiety-inducing thoughts away.
During a trip to the library to learn more about what was happening to him, Nick discovers that the word “panic” derives from the Greek god of the wild, Pan, and starts to think that panic attacks are actually the universe showing him insight – a secret, dangerous kind of knowledge. Soon afterwards, when he’s invited to the barn, where older school kids hang out, get stoned and explore occult ideas, Nick’s mind unravels.
“I wanted to explore the idea of a group of kids who are looking for something weird, tripped out and strange in reality,” says Clune. Specifically, he adds, through the lens of “another kid [Nick] who’s got this mental problem.”
Clune’s adolescence was similar to Nick’s. Much of Pan began as a memoir. Clune has difficulty remembering characters’ names because he confuses them with the names of the people he’d based them on. His agent suggested novelising it so that he could lean more deeply into the ideas around “madness and the supernatural”.
“These guys had a huge influence on my life,” says Clune. One of the things they liked to do was to analyse jokes, which usually kills them – but could build on the humour. “It was this idea that you could take aesthetic objects like jokes and just burrow into them with your mind and open up different levels of them.”
Like reading novels, analysing the world was exciting and hedonistic for Nick, a way to escape troubling thoughts. But when he started analysing himself – by writing what he called “redescriptions”, or accounts about what had happened to him each day – everything began to unravel. Meant as a buffer to help him slow down and process reality, the redescriptions ended up taking him deeper into abstraction within his own mind.
Clune had done something similar when he was 16, after reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913), the great modernist tome about childhood and memory that Proust had written isolated in a cork-lined room. “If you’re 16, and you have an anxiety problem,” says Clune of his decision to examine his life by “overlaying” it with writing, “that’s a bad idea.”
Attempting to regain some of the control over his life that panic attacks had taken away from him, he spiralled further into his anxiety before having what he describes as a mental breakdown at 17.
The intensity of the attacks diminished but never fully went away. A few years later he discovered heroin, which he saw as “the total cure for the problems I have”, though it ended up taking him to a far darker place.
Ironically, as much as it was writing that complicated life for him as a teenager, it was writing that ultimately changed his life, allowing him to write himself out of one life and into another. The very act of scrutinising his experiences, which had so unmoored him as a teenager, helped him piece his life back together in recovery.
After breakfast, as we stroll through the quiet halls of the museum, stopping to look at several works that Clune particularly admires, our conversation turns to the future. Clune and his family are moving to Ohio, where he will take up a position at Ohio State University, about which he’s very excited. Soon after, he’ll take his daughter to Europe for the first time.
To Ireland, I ask? Not this summer, he tells me, but he already has plans for next summer to take his daughter, who is only a little older than he was when he first came to America, back to see where his story began.
Pan is published by Fern Press on July 24th
