Just read the book. Trust me.

Oh hey, so this is what a real memoir looks like:

I'm reading Duras and Bowles and Beckett--dark, absurd, strangely comforting. I've been working in the shelter for a couple years, I want to see how close to the edge I can come without falling. Two weeks later I find myself in an alley in a town called Mogador, buying opium from Mohammed and his friend. Just a little. The alley dead-ends at a wall. Mohammed unfolds a knife to shave off a gram (what kind of opium needs a knife to cut it?), then he turns this knife (goddammit, why is there always a knife?) toward me, touches my chest with the blade, asks softly if I'm sure I don't have any more money on me, just a little.

I've already been punched by police in Lisbon for taking a photograph of the wrong people. In a few days the police in Mogador will pick me up for speaking with a veiled woman. I'll have to spend a day in jail while they decide my fate, the hashish and the opium back in my hotel room, in the drawer with my passport. By the time I make my way to the border of Mauritania, to the edge of the Sahara, I see no end to being lost. You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn't a station you reach but just the general state of going down. Once you make it back, if you make it back, you will stand in front of your long-lost friends but in some essential way they will no longer know you.

--Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn