I Am Alive and You Are Dead by Carrere
I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (1993)
by Emmanuel Carrere, translated by Timothy Bent
315 pages - Metropolitan

'And if for reasons of His own, He decides to speak to an American writer, it won't be Norman Mailer or Susan Sontag but some hack toiling away in the dark, grinding out cheap novels that no one takes seriously.' (pg.267)

This is a biography written 'from the inside'. Dick's life is treated as a narrative, and there is much more of an effort to evoke truths rather than verify facts. There are no footnotes or endnotes, no bibliography or references, and very little attention is paid to dates. The book follows his life from the death of his twin sister when she was several weeks old to his beginnings as a SF writer in Berkeley, his various adventures in marriage and womanizing, his conversion to Christianity, his most drugged-out years when his home was a virtual open house for addicts, and his later mystical experiences and his attempts to make sense of them. A few of Dick's books are gone into in detail, illustrating how events and characters from his novels are tightly interwoven with his real life; often it is hard to know where the set of mirrored events happened first, in reality or on the page.

For what it is, this is a really fantastic book. It is essentially Carrere's view of Dick's life. You can try to guess but you won't know for sure where a verified anecdote might become authorial license, but if you constantly worry about that sort of thing while reading it you probably won't enjoy the book. I was surprised to learn that, contrary to the public image that was played up at the time, Dick didn't use street drugs until a late age, and apparently only dropped LSD once, a drug he was terrified of and that he had a horrific experience with. He did however, from the beginning, use prescription pills copiously and recklessly. The narrative gave me a headache at times when it flows into the various paranoid and deluded thoughts that Dick held at certain times, and there is no comparison made between these thoughts and 'reality' so theoretically the reader might indeed come to believe, if going strictly by this book, that Stanislaw Lem was merely an avatar for a Soviet think tank looking to abduct Dick, and that Richard Nixon, when he became president, was the number one Communist operative in the United States.

The big mystery I ponder is, what drew Carrere to write a quite thorough, 300-page biography on Dick? Certainly his affinities seem to lean more towards authors like H. P. Lovecraft and Richard Matheson, two others he found seminal, whom he mentions in passing here. As Dick's life moves forward, there are more and more references to the New Testament. Much like a drug in one of Dick's novels, Saint Paul promises that through the taking on of Christ, through his body and his blood, all of humanity will be changed and transformed. The images become unmistakable--in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch drugs are Satan's perversion of the Eucharist, trapping souls in the endless cycle of sin, in separation from their true selves. In Ubik the promise of the true Eucharist is presented, the cure against entropy, the gesture of love and charity, the path from death into life.

Dick for a time believed that we were all still living in 70 AD, that the Roman empire had never fallen, that a demon was presenting the modern world as a sort of movie projection over true reality, so we would forget that the second coming of Christ was imminent, and thus making literally true Jesus' statement that, "Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place." Was God, or one of His intermediaries, really talking thorough Philip Kindred Dick? Certainly he was terribly flawed, had emotional problems, mental problems, could be unpleasant to know, and ruined much of his health by abusing drugs; but these things alone are not argument enough against it, looking back at the past history of saints and prophets.

'There's nothing more pathetic than the mistrust of immediate reality by people who never stop splitting hairs over Ultimate Reality. They always think they're getting to the bottom of things, whose surfaces they turn away from as unworthy of their attention; they end up never knowing the flesh of the world, the softness of resistance it offers to the touch. They manage to bypass their own lives.' (pg. 308)