MANUSCRIPT AVAILABLE!
An excerpt from Burn Chart: A Memoir by Tom Hansen
“I had been giving my customers nicknames, usually based on physical appearance because there were so many it was easier to remember them that way. But there were a few who didn’t need a nickname, like Dylan. One of my musician customers, he had a band called Earth, a noise band signed to the Sub Pop label. Shortly after I started selling to him, he’d seen me play while I was hanging around his apartment, and asked me to play on an album he was recording. We went down to Triangle Studios one night, stoned out of our minds and I played, badly I think, on a couple of songs for the album Pentastar: In the Style of Demons. It was Dylan who introduced me to his best friend Kurt Cobain, another customer who didn’t need a nickname.”
In over 20 years as an agent, I have never seen a manuscript like this one. It came to me from the author’s profs at the Canadian university where he wrote it as his master’s thesis. But it tells a quintessentially American story. It has gone out today to 18 US editors, and will be added to our Frankfurt catalogue.
What if James Frey and J.T. LeRoy included documentary proof of their claims in their books? That’s what we have here — an astonishing, often gruesome, no-holds-barred tale of heroin addiction and recovery in Seattle in the 1990s that is documented with medical charts and newspaper articles. The passage excerpted above, selected to get your attention, is the only one that offers us a major celebrity. The book opens with a burn chart that looks as if it must have been written post-mortem: in 1999, Hansen’s skeletal, malnourished body was nothing more than a collection of open sores and dissolving bones, with three kinds of hepatitis. Burn Chart documents his recovery, with flashbacks telling us how he got to the state he is in. Along the way we learn about outrageous youthful escapades, the discovery of the amazing facts of his parentage, and the hard truth about his own responsibility for his fate.
Tom Hansen is real writer, and has a degree to prove it (see the cover page of the manuscript). Not just another junkie memoir, Burn Chart is a short, tightly written, powerful, and often painful-to-read document that is sure to become a classic. I can see it becoming required reading for every high school kid who is attracted to the “glamour” of the junkie lifestyle. Far from romanticizing it, Burn Chart offers the brutal truth. It will serve not only as a gut-punching deterrent between covers, but also as a clarion call for enlightenment in the way our culture deals with drugs.