Like Being Killed

"I could never predict what was going to ruin me and what was going to rescue me..." Ilyana Meyerovich has never been very far front disaster and loss. A self-described "suicidal, strung-out, psychotic Jew under thirty" Ilyana retreats into her astonishing mind, prays to obscure Catholic saints, and seeks her equilibrium in six white lines laid out on the kitchen table of a squalid Lower East Side apartment. Masochism and nihilism form the twin poles of Ilyana's heroin blurred existence, but this was not always so.