In the absence of a narrated relapse, it’s somehow the process of surrendering narration — giving up her diary, claiming she no longer needs one — that ultimately kills her off. But I never stopped keeping mine. I saw myself in this “real” girl, and even if she was fabricated, the self I recognized in her never was.

Leslie Jamison is the author of an essay collection, “The Empathy Exams,” winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Her first novel, “The Gin Closet,” was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; and her essays and stories have been published in numerous publications, including Harper’s, The Oxford American, A Public Space and The Believer.

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By James Parker

“It was the redness of unbelievable pain. He couldn’t see anymore — the rats had already eaten his eyes.” That, I think, is bad.

Did anyone else receive his sex education — or certain indelible parts of it — from Earl Thompson’s 1974 novel “Tattoo”? Raucously proletarian, buoyantly explicit, the book was a sort of Nelson-Algren-meets-Harold-Robbins sensation in its day. I was a tender young snoop in my parents’ bedroom, probing their shelf of puffy, mass-market paperbacks, when the opening pages blew my mind. Such sweating, such straining! “He heard the screen door of the trailer in the next yard screech and bang. He leaped to the window, kneeling on his bed to peek out in hope Mrs. Demicelli was going to take a sunbath.” (She was, of course.) For a couple of weeks “Tattoo” became my private gospel.

Image James Parker Credit... Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

But “Tattoo” is not a bad book. It’s not “Crime and Punishment,” no, but neither is it “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Thompson (who died in 1978) writes like a cut-rate Richard Price, barging from fight scene to sex scene to fight scene in blasts of broken-muffler prose. From this distance, which is to say from the soup-stained easy chair of my middle age, I see him as a kind of volcanic older brother — a rough, benign influence on my sexual and literary formation. James Herbert, on the other hand, is more of a twisted uncle. Herbert’s ‘70s horror-thrillers “The Rats” and “The Fog,” copies of which were circulated with queasy reverence in the dormitories of my English boarding school, have an inescapable feeling of moral taint. Sex in these books is a ritual prelude to getting chewed by mutant rodents or enveloped in an insanity-producing miasma. The writing flickers crudely, nastily, like a faulty neon tube. “Shivers ran along his spine, to his shocked brain. The dim shadows seemed to float before him, then a redness ran across his vision. It was the redness of unbelievable pain. He couldn’t see anymore — the rats had already eaten his eyes.” That, I think, is bad. And yet we adored these books, short-trousered vermin that we were, for their badness — for their viciousness and squalor. We wanted our teachers to be eaten by rats.

There is a whole genre of bad book that, as an adult, I very much enjoy, which is the as-told-to rock memoir — in particular the heavy metal memoir. It would be impossible, for example, to claim that “Iron Man,” by Tony Iommi, and “White Line Fever,” by Lemmy Kilmister, are good books. They are hasty, sloppy, repetitive, ramblingly told, spotted with dead patches. But Iommi, guitarist-songwriter for Black Sabbath, is one of the musical giants of the 20th century; and Kilmister, founder of Motörhead, is a monument to . . . something. Himself, perhaps. At any rate he is a fascinating man, a droll man, a man whose wooziest recollection is of interest to us. “I did die once — well the band thought I had, at least. But I hadn’t. The whole thing started when we were going home from a gig in the van. This guy, John the Bog, was our driver — actually, he died, about two years after this incident, come to think of it. . . . " Iommi’s is a dourer wit, the expression of a rare kind of hedonist-pessimist. Here he is on his wedding day: “We got in the car and of course we immediately did a quick couple of toots” of cocaine. “I thought, oh dear, so this is how the day is going to be.”