This practice-based PhD creatively and critically investigates the portrayals and the language surrounding the use of prescription stimulants, prescription opioids, and the pharmaceutical industry in literature and the medical humanities, asking what it means to understand, poetically inhabit, and creatively disrupt narratives of addiction, trauma, and coming of age.

The creative component, Autobiography of Ember, is an autofictional verse novel depicting a mother and daughter who live in a society with rampant prescription drug abuse in the 1990s, particularly to a fictional drug I call Stun. Stun represents the most addictive prescription drugs on the American market (Adderall and OxyContin). The creative component advances our knowledge of prescription drug addiction to intervene and re-shape the medical humanities by putting the imaginative space and creative possibilities of the individuals abusing prescription drugs at the center of the narrative project. 

The critical component starts by providing the social and cultural context of the crises in the United States, followed by a discussion of Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley and its use of a fictional ‘perfect’ drug, a device that I also use creatively to allow for the interlocking exploration of the social, legal, and medical aspects of drug addiction concurrent with individual life stories. The critical component situates my creative work within key contexts of contemporary verse novels to explore how hybrid and innovative modes of story-telling suit content with themes such as childhood trauma, addiction, and coming of age. Through the study of persona, specifically in Robinson Alone (2012) by Kathleen Rooney, I explore the freedoms and functions of Ember as my own persona and how the process of writing Autobiography of Ember enabled my own philosophy and methodology on how to authentically portray prescription drug addiction.