About Me

I spent years as a reporter, columnist, and foreign correspondent. I even wandered onto television a few times, including one spectacularly ill-advised reality show.

For most of that time, I was also addicted to crack cocaine.

Recovery didn’t just change my life. It changed what I wanted to write about.

I write under the pen name De Quincy, a nod to Thomas De Quincey, whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater remains one of the earliest and greatest memoirs of addiction. I admire his honesty and his prose, but that’s where our paths diverge.

His book often romanticizes the drug that nearly destroyed him.

Mine doesn’t.

These essays aren’t an attempt to relive the past or find beauty in addiction. They’re an attempt to understand it—and, more importantly, to understand what comes after. Recovery, family, shame, hope, forgiveness, loneliness, love, creativity, and the countless ordinary moments that slowly stitch a life back together.

Some essays are about crack. Many aren’t.

They’re about being human.

Why subscribe?

Most of what I write will always be free.

Writing helps me make sense of my own life, and if these essays offer hope to someone struggling with addiction—or to someone who loves a person who is—then that’s reason enough to keep writing.

But I’d also like to make a living doing the thing I love, instead of continuing to freeload off my mom.

A free subscription gives you most posts, access to the comments, and the community chat.

A paid subscription unlocks everything I write, the full archive, and an advance copy of the book when it’s finished. It also comes with my sincere gratitude—and, perhaps more importantly, my mom’s.

Whether you subscribe for free or become a paid reader, you’re helping support both my recovery and my writing. More than that, you’re helping shine a little light on an issue that’s spent far too long in the shadows.

I’m glad you’re here.

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