I have mixed feelings about this one. The writing is amazing and as always, I admire the author for being brave and telling her story.

Although the author brings us to dark places, she rarely seems accountable for her actions, which is a bit of a disconnect for me.

She is one lucky addict. She never ended up on the street, she never had any diseases deom the myriad of men and she basically somehow had money to fly from NYC to LA to Paris.

Nonetheless this was a good read.

#strungout #erinkhar #onelasthitandotherliesthatnearlykilledme #harlequin #netgalleyreview #Netgalley #ARC #booksofinstagram #books📚 #bookstagram #bookreview #opiodcrisis #addiction #heroin #memoir Erin is such a beautiful storyteller. Reading her words. Feeling her feelings. Having an understanding of her struggles. It isn't something that all authors are able to do. She doesn't sugarcoat the truth. She lays it all out there. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I am someone who is #fascinated by people and their #choices. I am the one who says #butwhy. This book gives us an insight in to a world that isn't one we've experienced before. It's a definite#mustread. You won't be let down.

I really thought that I would enjoy this book but I really had a hard time getting thru it. I have a hard time saying that when I review a memoir, because it’s about someones life. This is a memoir of a young girl and her substance abuse and mental health issues. This is the first memoir I have read about substance abuse, and this is really what I expected. This book felt really long or dragged out to me. I think the writing style made it hard for me to read, it seemed like a lot of short stories.

This book was provided to me by Netgalley for free, for an honest review.

Wow! This memoir follow's Erin's 15 year struggle with drugs and mental illness. Erin is forced to look into her past when her young teenage son asks if she has ever done drugs, when it fact she had a 15 year struggle. The memoir details Erin's journey through adolescence. Though the book is sad and covers a hard topic, it really shows what so many people are going through/hiding.



Thank you #Netgalley for allowing me to review.

“Addiction spares no one. Making it out is akin to winning the lottery, even when you have the resources and access for help.”

Erin Khar started smoking heroin when she was thirteen years old and used on and off for years until it become a constant thing in her twenties. She used intravenously for a while and added crack and other drugs to the mix. She’s a white woman from a comfortably well-off family. Her first stint in rehab got her clean for a while, but until she dealt with the psychological demons that she was using drugs to obliterate, she didn’t get clean.

The second time she went to rehab was with Dr. Drew. “He was better at explaining addiction to family members than anyone I’d ever heard. He talked about the science of addiction as a brain disorder, He emphasized that addiction was not the result of a moral failing. He explained how childhood trauma was rocket fuel for addiction. He talked about the commonality of the trifecta—childhood trauma, substance use, and a psychiatric disorder.”

I’ve read a fair number of these kind of memoirs, both of alcoholics and drug addicts. I’m always grateful that I never had friends who used any drugs except weed (before it was legal in many states), and that I don’t like getting high. I really enjoyed this one. Khar is aware of her privilege and how if she were black and had been caught with these drugs, her life would likely have gone in a very different trajectory. She never had to sell to support her habit, which is another thing that kept her out of prison. This is a memoir worth reading. Even if you never turned to drugs to avoid dealing with parents who are focused on themselves and not taking care of you, the kid, you can probably identify with the challenges of relationships with parents, friends, boyfriends, and, most significantly, yourself.

Unfortunately, I was not impressed. This read like many addiction memoirs: I used, I cleaned up, I relapsed. There was not much exploration of the people who inhabited the author's life. It was mostly "I did this, I did that" with many men coming and going throughout. I wondered if the author had any sense of herself beyond her myriad relationships with the various men she became attached to and then broke with.

Interesting read and very timely. I recommend this book quite highly.

Thank you NetGalley for letting me read it!

This memoir started with a bang and didn't let up at all through the whole book. This memoir is all about our author and main character Erin and her addiction to Heroin. It started off with her talking to her thirteen year old son and then it jumps into what led her to be addicted and everything that came along with that. I found this book very sad because of the obvious however it was a very compelling read. Our author was very likable and I was rooting for her even through all of the struggles that she went through. This book sheds a much needed light on addictions and how they sometimes come about, and all of the pain that they cause not only the addict themselves but their families and the people they care about. I liked how our author spoke about the drug addiction with almost a matter of fact tone. There was no sugar coating anything as she confessed
some of the darker things that she did but she did talk about how they caused her pain so it wasn't all spoken about with rose colored glasses. Erin's fall into drug addiction was quick and very destructive but that is part of what made it an interesting read. Very sad but eye opening memoir that will give the reader a new look on what a drug addict really looks like. I'm very glad I got the chance to check out this story so thank you Netgalley and Harlequin- Trade Publishing.

A raw honest memoir Erin Zohar shares with us her fifteen year opioid addiction.A young girl whose life seemed happy Normal is swept up by this addiction ban important honest cautionary read.#netgaley #harlequinbooks,

I love Ask Erin, so I had high expectations for this book. I was not disappointed. It is a quick read, and a fascinating look into the cycle of addiction. I am appreciative of how the author addresses her privilege head-on. It isn’t necessarily a YA book, but I will definitely be adding this to my HS collection.

Strung out by Erin Khar is a memoir detailing the drug addiction, mental illness, and abuses in the life of the author. The book opens with Khar trying to figure out how to formulate an answer to her own child's question of whether his mother had ever used drugs. Coincidentally, when Khar's twelve-year-old son asks her this question, he is just one year younger than when his mother first used heroin at the age of 13 years of age.

To be honest, while reading this memoir, and others like it, (for example Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking), I have to admit a bias of those of the upper classes when it comes to issues such as substance abuse, nihilistic behaviors and other debilitating life occurrences in their lives. This is not to lessen or besmirch the troubles in the lives of the well to do or to express a belief those well off automatically have trouble-free lives. However, when reading memoirs like this, I tend to think of all of the other hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people lacking the resources, safety nets and opportunities of the upper classes, while wondering who will tell their stories and how their voices are held silent by the tethers of being rooted in the lower socioeconomic shackles of life. And due to the contents of at least the first seventy-five percent of this memoir, those biases were not removed, which made it difficult to finish the memoir.

My main issues with the memoir were the assemblage of the book and how the adage "first impressions are lasting impressions" impacted how Erin Khar was first perceived. With the way the chapters of the memoir were gathered, it was hard to establish empathy with her or feel sympathy toward her. The first parts of the memoir detailed an extravagant lifestyle (brand new cars, jewelry, designer clothes, overseas jaunts, paid for apartments and so on) of what appeared to be the description of a spoiled and petulant young woman, disrespectful of her fortunate socioeconomic standing in life, one of which she had nothing to do with other than being born into it. This then clouded over the power of her experiences and while reading the memoir lessened the impact of her life until reaching the end of the memoir.

To me, to make a memoir such as this resonate, the author must write in a manner that defeats these biases. While reading Strung Out, this did not happen until the very end of the memoir. It is not until the end of the memoir where the reader learns what she has learned and who she has become and what her substance abuse filled life led to later in her life. Though she does sprinkle information through the memoir describing origins of her behavior, it is not until the very end where Khar really connected with this reader and where empathy and sympathy toward her emerged. I would have preferred to have felt that from the beginning and on through the memoir.