Tweaked: A Crystal Meth Memoir

“Elegantly constructed, searingly honest, and impossible to put down.” –Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon, winner of the National Book Award

“There are moments when I suddenly realize that I’m a nice boy from Iowa who is entirely comfortable sitting in a room of freaks.”

So begins Patrick Moore’s unforgettable account of life as a crystal meth addict—a “tweaker.” Like a wild ride down Alice’s rabbit hole with a guide who is darkly funny and heartbreakingly honest, Tweaked chronicles a twenty-year trip that stretches from Moore’s lonely childhood in Iowa with his grandmother, Zelma—an alcoholic artist who, when loaded, turns frozen food into crafts projects —to the day he sits, naked, in a Los Angeles rental, hallucinating about psycho-robbers while talking to a possum he’s sure is God. Along the way, there are acid trips at the V.F.W., Dexetrim study halls with his Bad Girl Posse in the seventies, teeth-grinding nights of dancing and anonymous sex in New York City’s hottest eighties clubs, taking pictures of Andy Warhol, losing friends and lovers, and navigating a Byzantine underworld of cookers, users, club kids, dealers, and colorful characters as intense as the drug itself. There is Lee, the glamorous, outré bad boy with a devastating wit and a taste for danger; Tony, the tweaker who likes to remove his eyebrows; Ding-Dong, the Depends-wearing, nearly blind housemate; Hisako, the artist and squatter with an impenetrable Japanese accent and a fondness for hot plate cooking; “Mother” Judy, the tough, butch rehab counselor who takes no prisoners, and countless others on the road from crystal meth hell to eventual sobriety.

Candid, gripping, and ultimately triumphant, Tweaked is that rarest of memoirs—a tale so vivid and personal in the telling it feels like fiction, but every word is true.

“Devastating…Moore writes fearlessly.” --The Washington Post

Patrick Moore has worked as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Village Voice and the Advocate.  In recognition of his work for the Los Angeles Times and Newsday, he was nominated for a 2005 GLAAD Media Award as outstanding newspaper columnist.  As an activist, Patrick was an early member of Act-Up/New York.  He was also the founding director of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, which pioneered the idea of preserving artworks as cultural artifacts of the AIDS crisis.