Chris Fleming’s On Drugs is a memoir of addiction, but it is also a book about compulsion in a wider sense: the rituals, evasions, self-deceptions, and private systems by which a life is held together and then gradually undone.

It follows the escalation of drug use from student experimentation into something far more destructive, moving through hospitalisations, arrests, breakdown, and the slow unmaking of a tightly managed self. Giramondo’s own framing is useful here: the book opens outward from substance use into questions of religion, masculinity, mental illness, and recovery. 

Fleming is better known in Australian intellectual circles as a philosopher and cultural analyst, which gives the book a different texture from the usual confessional memoir. He writes with a strong analytic instinct, but without scrubbing away the absurdity or humiliation of what he’s describing. The result is a memoir that is sharp, self-aware, and often unexpectedly funny, without becoming glib about addiction or its damage.

First Australian edition, 2019 (Giramondo Publishing). Very good condition: clean, tight binding with no markings observed. Covers show minimal shelf wear; pages crisp. A well-kept copy.