ITEM OVERVIEW
Bad Habits is the mostly-autobiographical story of Road's personal revolution.
Growing up Cuban in West Miami, the protagonist clashes with the confining and repressive aspects of that culture, and, like countless other young people, leaves for New York as soon as she's able. Landing in Brooklyn, she moves into a house full of wild characters, and enters an underground scene that few ever see. Of her new family, she writes, "We were the things that went bump, crack, and hump in the night."
In Bad Habits, Road takes us on an uncensored tour of her world- dingy dive bars, drugs in dark bathrooms, and long nights in strange beds. Her street-psychopharmacology results in experiences that are both revelatory and tragic. In her circle, drugs are cheap, ubiquitous, and they sometimes feel like the only way out.
Writing in a tradition of transgressive authors—mostly male like Genet, Bukowski, Selby, Rechy, but also female like Kathy Acker and Eileen Myles—Road takes us deep inside the damaged soul and psyche of her young protagonist with a crushing language, violent as the street: "According to the law, I'm just some bipolar junky who happened to have been sexually assaulted once or twice, and later mind-fucked by some crass romantic I shouldn't have trusted anyway."
But our heroine learns to leave her bad habits behind and emerge stronger and more independent, clean and open to love. Still punk, but punk by her own rules – she finds that life can be much more than mere survival.
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