Lydia Lunch is a musician and photographer, No-Wave instigator and sometime movie star. She is also, as proved in her latest book Will Work For Drugs, a consummate chronicler of pain, anger, and survival.  She writes fluidly, flamboyantly, explosively; her thoughts are expressed in sentences so highly and lowly decorated that they sometimes sink under the weight but then they push up to the surface again and scream: I am still here!  Subtlety is not in her repertoire but that’s okay.  The kind of stuff she is communicating comes from a planet where subtlety just won’t cut the atmosphere.  Hers is a place of childhood abuse so cruel it made my stomach turn, teenage rebellion akin to the worst nightmares, and adulthood punctuated by razor sharp edges of experience, experimentation, and a constant need for affirmation of life.

The first essays in the book are about her childhood. There was no real “child” hood for Lunch, instead her early years were devoid of security or parental love, and rife with abandonment, humiliation, and suffocation of self.  Lunch was victim of a violent sexual initiation.  Her essay “Canasta” describes the most horrific scene of lost virginity in all its myriad meanings: everything pure, untouched, youthful, and innocent is taken away irrevocably through a card game, a winning hand, and a limp yet still lethal appendage.  The fact that Lunch survived the experience without turning into a catatonic killer and revenging mutilator can only be due to her strongest trait: her will to be alive.  No one can take that away from her and she sticks the landing every single time some or another subhuman flips her in the air.

Her essays on how she relates to policemen (“I love cops and the cops love me“)and motherhood (“I understand children. It’s their mothers I can’t fucking stand” ) show just how successful her survival has been.  Lunch is funny, unpredictable, and surprisingly warm in these essays, as well as dead-on acute in her observations of contemporary life. Her essay on religion and war is marked by the scars she bears from her past: it is pervaded with pessimism about the ability of humans to live cooperatively, and to evolve beyond war and strife and violence in the name of God: “Religion used to be the opium of the masses.  Now it’s the crack cocaine of assassins“. Given her experiences, it is easy to understand why Lunch believes “War is an incurable virus, forever mutating, that travels the globe feeding on man’s fear, spreading panic and terror, violence and death.”  (I’d like to send her a copy of Paul K. Chappell’s book, Will War Ever End? and get her reaction to his assessment that “we are living in an era that gives us a greater chance of ending war than any in the past….We can bring humanity toward a new vision of peace for the twenty-first century.“). But even in this sober essay, Lunch can be funny and sharp, as when she offers a twist on the virgins waiting in heaven for deserving suicide bombers: “Heaven to me would mean dying with a smile on my face screwing half a dozen returning Iraq War veterans.  Hell, somebody’s gotta take care of them.  Their own government sure as hell won’t.”

The short fiction (slash non-fiction) pieces were less wonderful than the essays and even bordered on the banal in their constant upping of the ante of vicious sex and death-taunting, drug and alcohol-addled forays into sadomasochistic relationships.  The five pieces became repetitive in their mantra of mean sex, absent and substitute mothering, and cycles of dependency and disgust.

At the end of the book Lunch clues us in to the fact that as much as she has exposed of herself, there is still a persona she is projecting (“I am wearing a thin black slip. I’m barefoot.  I got hair in my eyes and I’m smoking a Lucky Strike and drinking a Cuban coffee“) and an inside she is shielding from view.  She says that “Pain is the great divide. Those who have walked barefoot into the mouth of the volcano and those who haven’t.  And if you haven’t, you’re just not on the same level of understanding.“  Maybe pain is also the divide from what she will share and what she holds hidden, and dear. She shares the pain, the horribly real and the grimly funny, but maybe the non-painful and quiet moments of genuine affection and simple existence she keeps to herself.  There are certainly no such moments in the book.  Will Work for Drugs is loud: it is beating, pumping, drumming, thumping, and absolutely bang bang banging with life.  Lydia Lunch, against terrible odds, is most adamantly alive.