"The prisoner in the photograph is me. The ID number is mine. The photo was taken in 1972 at the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland, Kentucky. I was twenty-one years old and had been locked up for a year already -the bleakest year of my life-and I had more time ahead of me" (Section 1, Chapter 1, p. 3).

"My entire year was a grand balancing act between doing what I wanted and doing what I should, and being who I was while inventing who I wanted to be: a writer with something important to say." (Section 1, Chapter 2, p. 9).

"I kept drinking more and more until I discovered I could drink lots of beer. Nearly a case of it in a sitting. Unfortunately, I was also in the process of discovering I had no tolerance for that much alcohol and I always became blind drunk and ferociously ill, spending almost every...