By Lisa Crystal Carver. Soft Skull Press, 250 pp, $18.95, softcover.

Life can really mess you up. That's one of the messages in Lisa Crystal Carver's engaging Drugs Are Nice, which is subtitled A Post-Punk Memoir. Life certainly dealt Carver her share of bad cards, not the least of which was an absent, narcotics-dealing father who admitted to her when she was 16 that he had committed more than one murder in the line of duty. Time spent with this man, Carver writes in the prologue, "taught me that nothing about me or my life was worth preserving".

With that as her guiding principle, Carver plunges down a path that, if not for some innate instinct for self-preser?vation-and a dose of luck-might have led to early death or institutionalization. Instead, Carver became something of a left-of-mainstream celebrity in the late '80s and early '90s, thanks to her musically naive band Suckdog, her faux-scatological performances, and her pioneering zine, Rollerderby.

Carver confesses all but never apologizes for, and rarely seems to regret, any of her questionable choices, which include running away to Paris at 19 to marry the much older, and even more unstable, French performance artist Jean-Louis Costes, then spending a season fucking strangers for money in a U.S. "massage parlour". She has a gee-whiz ingenuousness that is often maddening but never less than intriguing.

No one could pursue such a rigorous program of self-immolation without eventually reaching a crisis point. This finally comes during Carver's two-year affair with industrial musician and all-around bad boy Boyd Rice. Rice flirts with a public image as a Satan-worshipping fascist, but in Carver's account he's a violent-tempered mama's boy. She bears one child by him, the chromosomally damaged Wolfgang, who needs constant care. Rice insists she end a second pregnancy with an abortion. She claims that he later beat and choked her, at which point it's time to get out.

She also comes to recognize that she never did find what she was looking for, whatever that was (love and happiness? world peace? better living through chemistry?). Still, she's alive and she has Wolfgang by her side, and maybe that will suffice. Yes, life can sure mess you up. But if you're strong-or crazy-enough, you just might survive it.