Heroin, PCP, ex in prison by age 16 - no wonder I'm hooked on Julia Fox's story

LIKE every dutiful gay subject who has lived under her reign, I went to several Soho bookstores this Tuesday to buy the new Madonna biography

- Paul Flynn

It was the day of release, yet a succession of assistants looked puzzled at the enquiry. Flustered, I spotted another pristine hardback written by another Italian/American woman of stout gay repute, another attention magnet who blithely dusts controversy off her shoulder, another absolute dame who defines her particular New York moment.

With arched eyebrow wit and candour, Julia Fox’s memoir is titled Down The Drain. On the arresting cover, she is dressed for a fashion editorial, falling down a tube of crinkled silver foil, a drug reference she makes good on from the age of nine in this most startling of memoirs. Within two chapters I, too, was hooked.

The dedication page warns her father directly not to read a page of it. It soon becomes clear why. Ms Fox is an unflinching cult star, teetering precipitously on the margins of mass appeal. She has proved adept at provocative art, dominatrix sex work, independent film and extreme fashion, equating each professional discipline as flipsides of the same coin, a sliding scale of expression by which outsider survival is best arbitrated.