Actually, this book deals a lot with illusions. As a teenager, Carver, the product of a dysfunctional family, does her utmost to pull people away from their comfortable make-believe worlds. She does this by forming the band Suckdog and through performing a series of theatre-of-the-absurd plays, where the actors strip, pour things over themselves, slap people and break things - anything to wake the audience from their reverie. "We are waging war on perceptions of reality, with our physical Socratic method. We are losing money, health and safety - all that to give the gift of confusion to thirty of forty people a night. In confusion, all the pieces of what you think are scattered, and you might put them back together in a new way."

In saving humanity from itself, Carver compares herself to Mother Theresa: "except I'm naked and hitting people with a broom. And I pee in a litter box."

This is all historical fact. The people she hangs out with and fucks can be found on the Internet: GG Allin, Boyd Rice and the like. Their 'DIY, post-punk' movement was never named, but it tried, like punk, to turn reality on its head, to shake things up, to re-define what is. It's also about doing what the characters felt needed doing, doing what they wanted to do: "I guess, objectively, I have to say Andrew is crazy. But Andrew always does what he wants, what he believes, while millions of people never do, even once in their lives ... we get these impulses and we don't act on them because there are all these invisible walls up everywhere, but they're not real; there aren't really any walls at all."

This is the real strength of ‘Drugs are Nice‘: it's full of fantastic quotes about questioning the status quo and breaking free from it, like: "Activity and hurry and hate can keep you from making any real change at all, your whole life long," or "some people are good at building scary cages out of their anger and confusion; other people are good at moving into them" and "better to leap in the wrong direction than just to hover, to avoid possible disaster."

The problem is, people just don't want to be changed; they don't want their values questioned and thrown back at them. Especially from someone on the edge of things, like Carver, who is able to experiment with being a prostitute, and actually enjoy it, for a while anyway. Her play audiences often left before the show involved them too much. But Carver does attract a following of the alienated and disaffected, when she turns to publishing a fanzine called Rollerderby. Fanzines, as she explains, are the precursors to blogs, freak-seeking missiles uniting 'solitary wierdos with social Tourettes'.

She also writes a book called ‘Dancing Queen‘, a book about "kissing and fancy underwear, and the America that was once my life, before it became reduced to two things: taking care of Wolf and being afraid of Boyd."

Towards the end of the book, Carver's life changes abruptly from experimenting with life, coasting on ideas, inspiration, travel, friends and lovers to a complete nightmare. She's stuck in Boyd Rice's filthy basement; radical guru Boyd reveals his true nature as a paranoid, possessive drunkard; her son Wolfgang has a chromosomal deletion; she has a soul-wrenching abortion.

Is this a book about growing up? Readers must make this judgment call themselves. Perhaps you, the reader, "have grown up, but you are still muffled with what you've built around yourself." Perhaps Carver finds, in the end, that it's easier to change herself than to change the world.

She seems to harbour no regrets. "At least I know what it was like to destroy a stage, naked, in Paris ... I don't have to wonder what my life could have been, because my life was ..." Wish I could have met ... and shagged her!