SOURCE: “Verbal Entries: An Interview with Jim Carroll,” in The Booksmith Reader, www.booksmith.com.

In the following interview, portions of which also appeared in The Street, Gladysz and Carroll discuss Carroll's writing career, his methods of writing Forced Entries and The Basketball Diaries, his literary influences, and his rehabilitation from heroin use.

Perhaps best known as a rock musician, Jim Carroll is also an accomplished poet and writer. His best lyrics, such as “People Who Died,” are themselves a kind of poetry. Recently, a film based on his best-selling book, The Basketball Diaries, was released to general acclaim. His first commercially published book of poems, Living at the Movies (1973), was issued when he was just twenty-two. That was followed by The Basketball Diaries (diaries, 1978), The Book of Nods (poems, 1986), Forced Entries (memoirs, 1987) and a selected poems, Fear of Dreaming (1993), which also includes uncollected and newer works. A...