I read Harley Loco with my book group, and what a wild ride it was! Rayya Elias’s memoir is about migration, not fitting in, trauma, drugs, hair, music and survival.

Rayya Elias (1960-2018) is Syrian. She was born in Aleppo and grew up with three siblings in a big flat with French windows and marble halls. A couple of childhood accidents – one involving leaping from a wardrobe and her brother failing to catch her, and another where she broke her leg and was bed bound in traction for an extended period were shaping moments for her.

Pain makes you stronger, and nothing is too great for us to achieve.

Orthodox Christians, her family fled Syria as the Ba’ath party rose to power. They headed for the promised land, the USA, and went from being landowner farmers with a father who was treated like a king to being poor immigrants, where the only work her father could find was as a janitor.

One of the first photos I saw of myself was when I was about four or five years old. I was at my brother’s first communion party and I was singing for a table of archbishops and priests with a cookie in my hand…When I look at these pictures, I love myself, and I think I look perfect and adorable. These pictures spark memories of happiness and elation at all the attention I got for singing.

Rayya’s family socialised mainly within the Syrian community in Detroit, but she went to an American school, where, despite her best efforts to fit in and make friends, she was an outsider and mercilessly bullied. Her experiences changed her from being high spirited and fun to developing a tough exterior and taking drugs to numb her discomfort and grief, and because to begin with it felt like fun.

I learned from a very young age that life was chaotic, but if I could hold my breath long enough (even while kicking and screaming), and come up for air once in a while, they I would have the chance to fight for what I wanted or needed.

The drugs soon took hold, but Rayya also discovered she had a talent for cutting hair and making music and started to become successful at both after finding her tribe through those pursuits. She also discovered she preferred girls to boys, a more complex issue for her to grapple with – particularly given her cultural background and that she had a devoted boyfriend at the time.

I could be free. The edge on life that I’d been looking for all along could be mine now: my work, my goal, my pride, and my dream. It seemed easy and obvious and like the only conceivable choice. All I had to do was be clean, that was the edge.

Her first big female lover refused to choose her over a man, and Rayya’s path to self destruction was sealed. Her emotional void was filled with coke, casual sex, porn, crack and eventually heroin and it was not long before all her success in hairdressing and music started a backslide into theft, betrayal, hustling, drug dealing, homelessness, multiple arrests, and jail.

People talk about that moment of clarity for drug addicts. I sat there, in the pile of dirt and sweat I’d woken up in, and I cried. Unable to get up, unable even to turn off the hideous TV, I cried and cried, out of fear for myself and sadness at the mess I’d made of my life. There were no police, parents, rehabs, shrinks, friends, or lovers to tell me what was wrong with me. There was only a voice inside my head, first low and weak, but quickly gathering strength and conviction till it rumbled through me as powerfully as the call for heroin had the evening before. It said: Rayya, you don’t need to do this anymore. You can be free.

Her family never gave up on her, but multiple attempts at getting clean with violent withdrawals failed, until sobriety eventually prevailed. It was either that or die, and she figured given she had overdosed several times and survived, death could not come from drugs.

The calm and smooth ride of life, without all the peaks and valleys, is a goal I constantly strive for now. But back then, it felt unnatural.

English was no Elias’s first language. The writing of her memoir is sparse, frank and brutally honest. She paints herself frankly as she descended into a spiral of self destruction, self absorption and cruelty and she sucked others into her addiction. Harley Loco was uncomfortable to read, but ultimately triumphant as Rayya did escape addiction and find her way to a good life after drugs.