Join us for an epic California memoir as Jason Yamas presents Tweakerworld (Unnamed Press) live with Emma Koenig.
After Jason's world falls apart in LA, he moves to Berkeley for a fresh start with his kid brother. Just one problem: his long-closeted Adderall addiction has exploded into an out-of-control crystal meth binge. Within weeks, Jason plunges into the sprawling ParTy n' 'Play subculture of the Bay Area's gay community. It is a wildly decadent scene of drugs, group sex, and criminals, and yet it is also filled with surprising characters, people who are continually subverting Jason's own presumptions of the stereotypical tweaker.
Soon Jason becomes a dealer on the pretense of researching this tweaker world for a project that will carry him, like a life raft, back to the shores of a normal life. But his friendly entrepreneurial spirit and trusting disposition disarm clients and rival dealers alike. The money begins to roll in as demand increases to frightening levels. Suddenly, Jason is in control of the entire crystal meth market for San Francisco's gay community, even as he finds himself nodding off behind the wheel of his car, or walking down the sidewalk. As friends and family work frantically to steer him towards recovery, Jason resists, chasing something else: a sleepless nirvana fueled by sex, drugs, and the Tweakerworld.
With painful honesty, Jason Yamas has crafted a landmark narrative that is not just a personal account of addiction, but a portrait of a vulnerable, largely undocumented community of people who, for many reasons, have been marginalized to the point of invisibility.
Jason Yamas is a queer writer producer, director, and actor. With the publication of Tweakerworld, he intends to shine a bright light on the worsening epidemic of crystal meth in the LGBTQ+ community. He holds a BFA from NYU, Tisch School of the Arts and is currently working on his first novel. You can find him on Instagram @jasonyamas or Twitter @jason_yamas. He lives in Los Angeles and is represented by Laura Usselman at Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency.
Emma Koenig is the creator of Fuck! I’m in My Twenties, a handwritten/illustrated tumblr which spawned a book and a guided journal published at Chronicle Books and a TV version developed at NBC. She was a cartoonist for The Times UK Sunday Times Magazine and has written for TV shows on ABC, Youtube Red, and Verizon go90. Her third book, Moan: Anonymous Essays on Female Orgasm was published by Grand Central Publishing in May 2018. She is repped by Writ Large and CAA.
