A review by lindick
Zipper Mouth by Laurie Weeks

3.0

Hmmm I thought I would love this book more than anything and I....liked it? Or, more accurately, in rare moments I really loved it and found it the most relatable ever (like the bit about her doing laundry in a fit of 'this will be just the start of a clean new life': she brings the clean laundry back from the laundromat and throws it on her bed and maybe 2 days later puts it into piles and even though her dresser drawers are only 2 feet away, they stay there and they sort of slough off the bed onto the floor some of them and some get cat hair on them and eventually it's weeks later and all of her washed clothes have merged with the b-list 'didn't rate washing with the first group' dirty clothes so they're all basically dirty again and what was supposed to be so uplifting and "pull myself up from the muck of paralysis to cleanse and renew myself at the Lourdes of the Laundromat" just "managed to add yet more poundage to the anvil of demoralization dragging me further each day into a primal bubbling stew of self-disgust"). But then so much of it was just a gross upsetting haze of heroin addiction and general debauchery which I found weirdly hard to get through. I feel like normally drug addiction books are super upsetting and hard to read but at the same time you get that watching-a-car-crash feeling of needing to find out what terrible thing happens next, but the stream-of-consciousness-non-linear style made it just a little bit...boring?