Confessions of an Painkiller Addict: Interview with Joshua Lyon, Author of Pill Head

It’s not often that people feel like confessing their darkest secrets and behaviors. It’s even less often that they do it in a memoir for all the world to read. But that’s just what Joshua Lyon, journalist and author of Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict, did. Brutally honest and gut-wrenchingly revealing, Lyon’s book is a hybrid memoir, combining personal anecdotes with journalistic research and reporting. Lyon’s unflinching look into the world of painkiller abuse, addiction, and recovery is harrowing…and hard to put down.

WordHustler sat down with Lyon to discuss his background in journalism, his experience writing such a personal memoir, and why he owes everything in his life to heroin. Confused? Read on.

As a special WordHustler treat, we’re going to be giving away an AUTOGRAPHED copy of Pill Head, so stay tuned at the end of the interview for a brain-busing trivia question. You may win your very own copy of this taut and honest book!

WordHustler: Obvious question first: did you always want to be a writer?

Joshua Lyon: Yeah, I did. I mean, it sounds weird, but I remember one day in 3rd grade we were handed a piece of paper with a list of professions like “fireman,” “policeman,” “detective.” “Writer” was one of them and I remember it was the one word I was totally drawn to. I circled it with arrows and exclamation points, like, “That’s me!”

WH: What was the first piece of creative writing you wrote that wasn’t for school?

JL: I started writing some short stories in high school just to try it out and they were really horrible. I was super informed by Bret Easton Ellis and Dennis Cooper, so they were all very “1980s teenagers running away to Los Angeles and getting murdered by vampires.”

WH: What other books influenced you in high school and college?

JL: Anything dark, Dennis Cooper, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle- I liked that journalism bent. Oh, and Stephen King- I like horror or anything really grim.

WH: Have you written any horror projects?

JL: I’m working on a horror screenplay right now. I have to keep the idea secret. I have a writing partner who is the executive editor of Nylon. I’m very, very excited about it.

WH: What was your first career move out of college?

JL: Actually, it sort of started in college. To be honest: I owe everything in my life to heroin.

WH: Uh…how’s that?

JL: There was this girl I was friends with who had an internship at Interview magazine. I was in awe- I read Details and Interview obsessively back then and was so taken with the glamorous world of magazines. Anyway, this girl had this great internship but she kept messing it up- turns out she did tons of heroin and she’d get so high she’d miss days of work. I was so mad at her because I would have done anything for the opportunity she was squandering.

She ended up getting fired and I went into the career counselor’s office and said, “I want the Interview internship.” And I got it. But unfortunately they didn’t have anything in the editorial department, so they put me in the promotion department. I didn’t know what to expect but basically all I did was host parties, which was fine with me. I started there my junior year of college, throwing tons of amazing events for advertisers and all these former Factory people who were starting to die off and dissipate.

My senior year of college, our boss got fired and her assistant became the boss- she waited for me to graduate and then hired me on as her assistant. She’s been my mentor ever since. I had a job waiting for me the day I graduated college.

WH: Is she still there?

JL: No, she runs Glamour magazine now.  I was at Interview for four years and then she got a job at Conde Nast Traveler so I joined her there and we flew around the world and threw parties, but it started to feel soulless. When I was 25, I was like “This is the last chance in my life I’m going to be comfortable taking a massive salary cut to go after what I really want” because at this point I was the senior merchandising manager making great money but I wasn’t happy - I wanted to be writing.

WH: Were you able to write at all during this time?

JL: No. The the advertising and editorial sides of the magazine were like church and state, and I didn’t have any time to write personally. I was scared because the dream was starting to slip away. I didn’t even have any writing clips. But I did find out that one of my favorite magazines, Jane, was looking for a photo assistant. The magazine had been out for maybe two years at that point. I knew if I could get my foot in the door anywhere, Jane would be the best because all of their editorial was generated in-house.

I got in through the photo department, took a 65% pay cut and worked my ass off for a year, during which I pitched a ton of story ideas. Eventually they switched me over to the editorial side.

WH: How many years were you at Jane total?

JL: I left Jane after a few years but got rehired for another year and a half before it folded. I had some personal things happening in my life, which will end up in another memoir.

WH: Speaking of your memoir, Pill Head, are people calling it a straight memoir? It has such journalistic tones at parts…

JL: They’re calling it a hybrid, because it’s part memoir/part investigative report. One  of the other reasons I quit Jane initially was because I wanted to focus more on writing memoir stuff and I also got a job that came from one of the articles I had written for them about death fetishists - people who make fake snuff films.  I got a huge photographer named Steven Shore - the second living person to ever get his own show at the Met - to fly out to the San Juan Islands with me. I had been researching the story for six months prior to that. I worked really, really hard on the story and in the end they couldn’t run it because it was too dark.  It wasn’t Jane’s fault, it was one of those edicts from above.

WH: When you’re working at a place like Jane, are you under contract or can you sell a story like that to someone else?

JL: When you work for a magazine, everything you come up with belongs to them, but Jane gave me the rights to that story back. I tried turning it into a documentary, but because the subject matter was about sex and death, everyone said it was too intense. We shot a 15 minute trailer reel, and because of that I got offered a job to work on a documentary series for the Sundance channel about transgendered college kids called “Transgeneration.” So I moved to upstate New York to work on that.

Then I moved back to New York and worked for Variety, for their monthly magazine V Life, and then I was hired back at Jane and was there up until it folded.

WH: So what was your road to landing your agent?

JL: I was really, really lucky. It really is about knowing people and getting out there. I got invited to a birthday party for a girl who is my now-agent’s best friend. I met Erin [Hosier, of Dunow Carlson & Lerner], and we talked about books that I wanted to write. She was completely into my ideas. We went out first with the other memoir I mentioned earlier and it didn’t sell, mainly because it was so dark and not enough time had passed between the incident I wrote about for me to have any real perspective about it. At the time I was indignant, but I now see it’s true.

When we went out with Pill Head, it was a lot of the same editors we had taken my other book to and they didn’t remember me as the same author of the other book and they loved Pill Head, so that was funny.

WH: What’s the process when your agent is going out with something?

JL: This is what’s so great about Erin, because she’s constantly taking lunches with different editors at different houses and knows everybody. She compiled a very specific list of editors she knew would respond to this material and took it out to 6 people. 5 of them came to auction for the book.

WH: How long between taking it out and selling it?

JL: I had another one of those blessed moments where we went out with the proposal on a Friday and the cover of the NY Times Magazine on Sunday was “When Does a Doctor Become a Drug Pusher?” and it was all about pain killers. So all these editors were like “Why haven’t we done a book about this?” which is why it went to auction and sold within a week and a half. It was one of those dream scenarios that every author wants.

WH: And this was your second time, so you knew how arduous the process can be. Had you gone out with the other book the year before?

JL: No, it was about 3 or 4 years before. It was a slow, steady stream of “Nos” and it was totally painful.

WH: Had you written Pill Head at all when you were going out with your other book, Try Not To Breathe?

JL: No. I was a complete pill addict at the time and was not in any sort of place to be writing the memoir  I eventually sold. But back to the serendipity, Pill Head got bought, and then four days later Jane magazine folded, so I was out of a job but had this beautiful windfall because my book had sold. Then twelve days before Pill Head’s publication date, Michael Jackson died and everyone was saying it was an overdose of pain killers. It was just absurd.

WH: How long was the gap between your book being bought and it being published?

JL: Two years. It got pushed back from the fall to the summer but that ended up being a good thing because I finished the first draft of the book and had a complete meltdown and had to go to rehab. I was begging my agent not to tell my editor but it ended up being part of the book.

I had made it very clear to my editor that I didn’t want to write a “happy ending rehab drug memoir” because I don’t think that’s realistic. I’ve read so many memoirs where this happens and what I’ve noticed is that the authors often talk down to people who are still addicted. I really wanted to write a book for people who are currently using. I’m uncomfortable being out there as a spokesperson for sobriety, I’m much more comfortable being an advocate of harm reduction.

WH: And honesty.

JL: Exactly. I’d rather let people know about the realities of using and ways to get sober if they want, but I’m not going to stand on a soapbox and tell people how to live their lives.

WH: What do you think it is about prescription drugs that have made them such a flashpoint issue after years of them being so hush-hush?

JL: Here’s my theory: this goes back to the question I got asked a lot when I was going out with Pill Head which was: “Why hasn’t anybody written this book before?” Because there have been a lot of books dancing around the topic but none of them were really memoirs. My theory is that there are a lot of people who could have written a similar book, but they’re still taking these pills and have no interest in giving them up.

WH: Because you can have a longer, more sustainable habit with prescription pills than with many other drugs?

JL: Yeah, you can be a very functional addict, it’s hard to tell when people are on pills because you don’t reek of alcohol or have coke leaking out your nose. You can be a “normal” person, and I think people don’t want to highlight or face this because they don’t want to give it up. And there’s a whole element of presumed safety because people can always justify using when they get their stash from their doctor.

WH: How was the editing process for you? Did you work with many different editors?

JL: I worked with one editor the whole time and she really helped me make the memoir aspects and the journalism flow more seamlessly.

WH: Did you have any say over the cover?

JL: Surprisingly, yes. Hyperion asked for input and they brought some samples and let me say which ones I didn’t like.

WH: Is it available in e-book?

JL: Yes, the Kindle sales are actually really high. Again, I think I lucked out because I got a great deal of publicity after the Michael Jackson thing. My publicist had actually pitched me to “Good Morning America” and I was turned down, but the morning after he died they called me at home and said, “We want you live tomorrow morning.” And that was my first interview. It had a huge impact on sales, of course. It was amazing.

WH: What’s your next move?

JL: I’m going to be working on my horror screenplay and I’ve been doing some ghostwriting as well. I also write pieces for Nylon and TheNervousBreakdown.com, and I blog for the Huffington Post. I focus on drugs and harm reduction, but I can go in with any topic, I think.

WH: What is your advice for aspiring writers out there?

JL: I think the best thing you can do is set a word count for yourself every day. It’s that old saying: “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration,” which is really true. You have to do the work. Even if it’s just 500 words a day, then do that. If you get burnt out at 500, stop. If you can keep going, go.

WH: Where do you write?

JL: I’m a laptop user, definitely. In my old house I had a specific writing room but now I’m in a loft space so it’s all open and it’s harder to write there because I don’t have a door to close. I’ve been going to write at a café a lot lately because they have a nice outdoor garden. Finding a comfortable space is really important.

As far as finding representation, just keep believing in yourself. Don’t ever give up. There were so many times I was convinced that my career was going nowhere and that I was a loser but if you tell yourself you’re going to get out of it, you will.

WH: What’s your take on WordHustler?

JL: WordHustler is great for aspiring writers. Anything that helps you streamline the confusing and massive business end of this career is a godsend.

Now that’s some advice that isn’t a tough pill to swallow. Writing is hard, but worth it. Do you have an honest, provocative memoir you’ve been disciplined about writing? Is it ready to get sent out there? Why not send a query to The Zoe Pagnamenta Agency or Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency? If you’ve put in the work, had someone help edit your manuscript, and targeted your queries, then you’re good to go!

And now, it’s time for you to win an AUTOGRAPHED copy of Joshua’s book, Pill Head!

QUESTION: What is the name of another popular pill-themed memoir written by a woman whose initials are E.W.?

Answer in the comment box below. We will put all correct answers into a pot and randomly pull a winner by October 28th! An autographed copy of Pill Head could be yours! Good luck- with the trivia and your writing!