Former drug user to speak to local teens Former drug user to speak to local teens (January 09, 2004)

Author of new book will host talk at Los Altos High

By Julie O'Shea

"I've written books and articles about teenagers since I was one myself," author Meredith Maran writes in the introduction of her new book "Dirty: A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug Epidemic."

"Driven then as now by the same Big Question -- the question that drove me to smoke my first joint and write my first book in high school, the question that drives me still: How and why are things in America so different from the way they're supposed to be?"

This skewed version of America that Maran explores in "Dirty" is through the eyes of three teenagers -- drug addicts and societal misfits.

How did they get this way? What went wrong? And how can society prevent it from happening again?

These questions are ones Maran said she hopes will engage her audience, when she gives a book talk next week at Los Altos High School. The Jan. 14 event will be held in the campus' Eagle Theater, 201 Almond Ave., starting at 7:30 p.m.

For Maran -- a 52-year-old author who has written for a variety of local publications including Mother Jones, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News -- "Dirty" has been a personal journey, spurred by her own painful high school memories and the bumpy relationship she'd had with her youngest son, Jesse, a recovering drug addict who has been in and out of jail most of his young life.

"I am interested in social change. We can learn a lot from teenagers," said Maran, speaking by phone earlier this week from her Oakland home.

"I had a really hard time as a teenager," said Maran, who was expelled from high school for protesting the war in Vietnam. She never went back for her diploma.

"It was a really rough one for me," Maran recalled. Now, "I'm trying to find out why Jesse had such a hard time and why."

"Dirty" chronicles the lives of three adolescents as they move in and out of rehab clinics. Maran is brutally honest, wanting, through these teens' own words, to wake up a nation that has turned a blind eye to a troubling epidemic.

"I know the price," Maran writes. "I've paid it, first as a raging teenager, then as the mother of one."

E-mail Julie O'Shea at joshea@mv-voice.com

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