It doesn't take long -- half a paragraph -- before the flavour of what is to come hits. Little Lisa, living in Dover, N.H., is 6. Her mother hands her the telephone.

Daddy, it turns out, is a drug dealer; about a decade later, he's off to prison again, this time for murder. Mom is more refined, but is an invalid, her various body parts sequentially sacrificed to Crohn's disease. By the time Lisa is 15, already having been schooled in a form of Nietzschean libertarianism by bad dad (whom she adores, though he tells her one of his proudest achievements is not beating her), all bets of a normal life are off.

So, Lisa becomes as deviant as possible: musically, behaviorally, sexually. She's part of the DIY (Do It Yourself) underground, where anything goes. But that sort of liberation comes with a big price tag, mostly in the form of men who make daddy look like Ward Cleaver. She becomes a devotee of scum rocker G. G. Allin, marries self-destructive (and -- nudge nudge, wink wink -- very much older) French performance artist Jean Louis Costes. The noirest bête in her menagerie is Boyd Rice, Satanist, possible neo-Nazi, Charles Manson fan and an abusive alcoholic with whom she has a child, Wolfgang, who suffers from a severe chromosomal disorder. His birth is the crisis in Carver's life, a "give me liberty or give me motherhood" choice that forces her to rein in her kamikaze style.

This book is proverbially unflinching, with Carver casting as uncompromising an eye on herself as on any other player. But she's not just a confessor; she's a new kind of cultural anthropologist, extrapolating her own obsessions and behaviours into an extended, sophisticated view of Homo Americanus.

I should note that Lisa Carver has reviewed for Books. In fact, one of the first reviews she wrote for us contains the single most alarming sentence ever submitted to this section. It is entirely unprintable, but so evocative, so funny, so unselfconsciously obscene that your editors chuckle about it (slightly red-faced) to this day. But that openness to being offensive, and utter good-naturedness about it, is part of what makes Carver sui generis.

Many if not most readers may be tempted to dismiss Drugs are Nice as just another confessional work by an adolescent rebel turned punk turned mom. But that would be a mistake. Or, rather, you'd be depriving yourself of the opportunity to follow the amazing and terrifying arc of the life of a free spirit who has found herself in various sorts of chains. In her brutally frank, beautifully observed retailing of her own misadventures. Lisa Crystal Carver, it turns out, has pretty much created herself -- and imaginative, forgiving and mischievous describe her to the life.

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